


we were made for lovin'

by quietmarvel



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: A bit of canon divergence, F/M, M/M, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Slow Burn, first avenger to infinity war
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-10
Updated: 2018-07-10
Packaged: 2019-06-08 07:11:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 35,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15238131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietmarvel/pseuds/quietmarvel
Summary: There's only ever been one constant in Steve's life, really. (or: Bucky and Steve's story from beginning to bitter end.)(told in alternating Steve's POV and Bucky's letters that he never sent)





	we were made for lovin'

**Author's Note:**

> -I did the best I could with historical accuracy; please forgive me if I have erred and just point it out  
> -I'm planning three total chapters: one pre-war and pre-serum, one during the war, and one about everything that happened after he was unfrozen  
> -Yup that's about it and this is my first ever fic on here so please let me know what you think. :)

chapter 1: we were made for breakin'

“And back then, we were kings of the world if we could buy a fresh fruit, or maybe a soda if you were really lucky. We were kings, we really were”

 

1944: _I missed you. I missed you the way the sky misses the light of the stars every morning, when the raging river of blue above our heads wipes out their pinpricks of shine._

_And maybe that’s it. Maybe the morning is the truth, the screaming white of the sun blotting out any hint of hope from the retreating night. Down here in the dark we can hide for hours, days, years if we’re lucky. It’s just like the trenches, huddled down, pretending there’s no sky above our heads, pretending that dozens of feet away there aren’t people ranging to kill us just as we’re ranging to kill them. We can hide in the pale starlight, and I’ll make a life for us. I’ll paint it out with the muted colors of the night, or maybe you can color it with your artist’s hands, tracing stories into the sky. You only ever had four colors, anyway. I wish I could have bought you more and seen your eyes spark up with joy, when your breath caught like it always did, seeing that blue colored pencil, sharp and honed like a knife. I loved that red flush of happiness over your cheeks that showed me, maybe, if I couldn’t love you the way I wanted to, I could at least make you feel alive, excited, whole._

_But even in this night, we are only temporary. Because the blue of the morning comes to rip you away from me, tearing us apart as the rosy dawn spills over the horizon. You and me, we explode, like some sort of celestial phenomenon, when the day comes. The morning pulls you away, and we burn so bright we forget to breathe, just for a second. We are a supernova, and the whole world hears us let go and rip apart and burn._

_The pieces of you and me scatter over the battlefields in Nazi France, same as they do over the black streets of London and the empty skies at home. They burrow in the soil, waiting to be watered, so thirsty and dry. They lay beneath the dirt where soldiers in green turn to soldiers in red with their eyes pointed up at the scratching sun. They slip between cobblestones as frightened feet tap over them, running to frightened children and frightened homes. They watch the city go dark. They fall over the roof of our old place and darken the windows like London in a blackout. They wonder where we’ve been. They wait._

_There’s no water on the battlefields. What’s left of us drinks blood._

 

1918

No one knows when the war is going to end. No one knows, and by 1918, Sarah Rogers has determined that no one cares. She reads the newspaper every day, rocks her swollen belly, and waits for news. She wants to see the words splashed luridly on the front page of the _Herald_ telling her that the fighting is over. That the American boys are leaving Europe. That she can let out a breath again. That her husband didn’t die for nothing.

The cold winter months arrive- tick ‘em off, January, February, March- and leave with maddening slowness. Still Sarah waits, as her stomach goes hard and she feels the beginnings of movements inside of her.

The soldiers, crouched in trenches in France, don’t move at all. Sarah counts the hours and minutes and seconds, but she cannot count the deaths. She cannot quantify the other women out there like her, who work with their minds and bodies and hands and still struggle, endlessly. She can’t imagine all of the empty graves; she can only remember the one that belongs to her, with _Joseph Rogers_ inscribed in the stone.

April arrives, and tiny wild buds bloom between the cobblestones and bricks and dirt. She recognizes one- _symphyotrichum novae-angliae-_ try and say that three times fast, huh- because Joseph showed it to her before he ended up in pieces in some ditch in Europe. Purple, he showed her, and it blooms where the ground has been tread upon: where our weary feet disturbed the road.

The daisies gather at Sarah’s apartment window, where she leaves them, their purples flashing. She thinks of Joseph, alone in France with the 107th, missing these flowers, and knowing that where his boots disturb the dark soil only death will grow in their wake.

Flowers remind her, on days when her sickness seems more present than the life in her stomach, that she wants to carry this child. That she loved Joseph so much that her heart swells. So when her vision blurs and fatigue’s cruel hands grip at her neck, Sarah keeps on living, for the child, for Joseph, for those daisies _._

Long before this child started growing inside her, Sarah knew something was wrong. The aching behind her eye sockets, the itching on her arms, her inability to ever feel full and whole and healthy: it followed her from the island back home to Ellis Island to Manhattan to Brooklyn. A doctor in Brooklyn diagnosed her, first, after she managed to make it past the probing Ellis Island doctors without revealing the flaws in her health. Diabetes mellitus, he said, looking over her wasting body. (Won’t last a year, he privately told his assistant.) Sarah survived that year, and the next and the next, but not without a cost. Food was expensive, anyways. She could sacrifice sugary and fatty foods for the sake of her health because she already couldn’t afford them. Even if it meant her pale body shrinking down into a wisp.

(Before he left, Joseph used to hold her tiny wrists in his hands, circling his thumb and finger all the way around. They fit together.)

Now, her diabetes seems lost in the shifting waters of who she used to be. There’s no way to heal her aching bones and mind, she decides, or the child in her stomach decides. Other sicknesses plague her now: the vomiting in the morning, the craving, the swollen feeling everywhere.

In June, the world goes dark. She knows it, hears it from the neighbors and the paper, prepares for it. But she is nevertheless awestruck, leaning against a streetlight on her narrow stretch in Brooklyn, one hand on her massive belly, as the moon spins across the sun until there’s almost no light left. Sarah looks through a piece of cloth, because the _Herald_ said the eclipse would burn her eyes without it. The others on her block, immigrants, mostly, and a couple of people down on their luck, stare right along with her. They’re all strung along some invisible string now, each and every person with his or her eyes turned skyward. She knows that the wealthy tycoons on Broadway are sitting in their suites with sunglasses on, looking up just like she is. Only an otherworldly phenomenon could shake the foundations of the world so much that those men would stoop down to the level of a suffragette Irish immigrant. Sarah doesn’t breathe.

Afterwards, John from next door is screaming and blind, with the crescent of the sun imprinted on his brown irises. It is then when Sarah learns that for however much the universe gives, it always takes back in its own way. She curses herself for straying from what her own mother taught her, with shaking fingers but a steady voice, back in Ireland: God is real, the fey are real, haunts are real, science is real, and God is the only one who’s always on your side. The rest? They drop blessings and curses to please their supernatural whims.

The next morning, Sarah trudges to the Catholic church four blocks away in her worn out shoes. As her feet scrape the dirty, cluttered Brooklyn sidewalks, she remembers another time: a younger, thinner silhouette walking to church in Ireland, with the scorching midday sun on her face. In her mind, this version of herself is young, lithe, new. In her memory, Ireland is rolling hills and rain and childhood, family dinners and misty mornings.

Her aching heels and throat and stomach remind her, though, of the bitter taste of hunger. Of the ravaging sickness. Of how her father would sit in the kitchen all day, eyes stuck to the wall and mind unmoving, because there was no work, not anymore.

She remembers, like a cobweb caught in her brain, like a tear that will never fully leave her eye, what happened after her father’s work dissipated into nothing.

She remembers when her mother found a body with a bullet in its head in the powder room.

She remembers why she fled.

The church opens its doors to her, the immigrant woman with a child in her stomach. Candlelight mixes with the cold daylight outside, and it all settles on the hymnals and prayer books stacked up on the pews. It’s startlingly like Ireland, but Sarah has always found solace in the fact that the churches are similar: same echoing sanctuary, close-knit pews, and saints. Her full stomach jostles beneath her as she walks to the altar, each step a familiar, measured path she has traced dozens of times before. The quiet church draws out a blessing from her, a Celtic prayer adapted by the Christians in Ireland. It’s a refrain her grandmother used to whisper to her, before the jobs disappeared, and no one of them could find peace anymore.

_Deep peace of the running wave to you._

_Deep peace of the flowing air to you._

_Deep peace of the quiet earth to you._

_Deep peace of the shining stars to you._

_Deep peace of the gentle night to you._

_Moon and stars pour their healing light on you._

_Deep peace of Christ, of Christ the light of the world to you._

_Deep peace of Christ to you._

To you, she says to the child inside her.

In less than a month, her body responds to the prayer, and she is writhing on the ground of her small apartment. She needs a midwife but has no means, money, or time to call one. Someone downstairs? The thought dissolves into nothing before she can act on it. Sarah’s eyes are half-lidded, and her breathing is short. Unconsciousness threatens her, with a whisper, then with a shout, but she grabs tight onto the leg of the table and _begs_ to stay awake. The picture of Joseph on the tabletop falters, then smacks to the floor beside her. She sees her husband in fragments, with her own scared face reflected in the splintered glass.

She screams.

No one is coming for her: not now, not tomorrow or the next day or ever again. No one saved her from empty stomachs and empty grief in Ireland, no one but herself. Her husband can’t help her; her neighbors won’t help her. The dark candle stubs and dusty windows and her half-salary tell her that she is so, so incredibly alone.

Alone, but she is not her father, not yet.

Sarah Rogers doesn’t close her eyes. She doesn’t die that day, or the next. She is made of tensile strength, like fragile silk, and she does not break when the world rips her apart. She is every immigrant woman with thin muscles and callused fingers and a rosary.

“Steven Grant,” she whispers against the ruined floor when she is done, and her heartbeat finally slows enough. Just like Joseph would have wanted: Grant, after his own father. The child in her hands doesn’t cry, maybe because he is strong like his mother, or maybe because he already knows there are truer things out there worth crying for.

Outside, the boom of fireworks resonates, thick with chemicals and gunpowder that could be in the gun of some tired infantryman in France. It is July 4th, and this infant country cries out for its independence, in warfare, in noise, in girls who cut their hair short and wear lipstick. Sarah holds her son and listens. Eight years ago, America was just a shade on the horizon as the boat rocked towards it. Before even that, the nation was a blip in her young mind, overshadowed by ailing grandparents and Irish tales and potatoes. Now, she knows: America is this child in her arms. Light blues eyes blink up at her, and the fireworks break the sky.

127 days pass before Sarah finally gets her satisfaction. “ _The War is Won!_ ” screams the headline in the _Herald_. Only several days later does Sarah realize it’s not a victory at all, but a stalemate disguised as peace. She sees the soldiers returning, in their uniforms, some with heads held high to the approving public, and some with eyes swung low with shame. They wear their kills on their shoulders and dusty green uniforms. She looks, she looks, she looks for Joseph, with Steve cradled in the crook of her arm. The world does not deliver; she knows it won’t.

“The war to end all wars,” says the crowd around her, say the politicians in their papers, says the family in the flat below hers, says John from next door. But John looked at the eclipse; but all of the world is blinded as history spins and unravels around them. Only Sarah sees, sick with the mixing scent of gunpowder and talcum powder as she carries her infant son in her strong, capable hands through the celebrating streets of Brooklyn. He cries, that day, when the boys come home. He cries because he knows they will have to go back. He cries, maybe, because he knows he will be among them when they do.

 

1928

“Steven Rogers, get down from there immediately,” Sarah Rogers says. Her voice has always been sharp, but soft around the edges. Steve, who is currently standing on the counter and gazing out the kitchen window, turns back around and gently slides off.

“Yes, Ma,” he says. Sarah nods, pleased, and Steve notices something: the crinkles around her eyes. His mother was young when she gave birth to him, alone and screaming, but she’s not so young anymore. In the span of ten years, time has begun to creep its shaking hands around Sarah Rogers’s fingers and pull them away.

Steve is young, a mere ten years, but he sees his mother’s suffering. He feels it, maybe, because he thinks he’s caused it. He sees her needles filled with Macleod’s insulin become fewer and fewer, because she needs the money to feed him. He sees how she struggles, pulling together scraps of food to make patchwork meals, how her willowy frame tenses as she tries to take on as many jobs as she can, nursing, hauling goods- it doesn’t matter. He knows, even then, that she is doing it for him.

“Well?” his mother asks, expectant. Her blonde hair, gray at the roots, jumps back in the wind as a breeze sneaks in the window. Steve waits, confused, and Sarah gestures to the kitchen table, piled with starchy potatoes and cabbage.

“On it,” he sings, and pulls his wiry body over the counter to get to the table. Sarah looks on in disapproval, but he gets to mashing. The white starch spreads out beneath his fingertips until there’s nothing left of the original shape. He gathers up the potato insides and hands them to his mother, who drops them in a bowl with a scant amount of flour and baking soda. Steve remembers a couple of years ago, when his mother would take a small glass container from the upper left cabinet and splash a bit of buttermilk on the mix. It was like watching some secret ritual: the creamy milk would drop onto the mashed potatoes- yellow, too, back then- and Sarah would mix them together with her strong, pale hands.

Steve hasn’t seen that glass container in a long time.

He goes back to cutting up the cabbage, ripping apart the stringy green parts until some sort of monstrous mass of vegetable sits on the table in front of him.

“Give me that,” Sarah instructs, and Steve hands over the cabbage. By now the boxty is sizzling on the stove. The scent of fried potatoes sticks inside of his nose, and it smells like home: a mix of Brooklyn and Ireland, of mother and son.

Night is falling, with the yellow Brooklyn sun gone from the sky. His mother’s nostrils contract and flicker as she finishes cooking a potato pancake for each of them. Steve provides two plates, and soon they each have a browning pancake, smoke still curling up, and a mangled slice of cabbage. They sit, as they always do, perfect opposites, at their small table. Already an artist, Steve imagines capturing this moment with charcoal- no, with muted oil paints: _Irish in Brooklyn_ , or maybe just _Potatoes_ or _Portrait of mother and son_. Steve thinks of Norman Rockwell’s paintings, all at once grand and simple, in the Post. That’s how he would paint Sarah and himself: like they were real.

“Steve,” Sarah says, when she finishes her boxty. “Steve, when you get to George Washington, you gotta stay there. You gotta do something.” Her blue eyes are fixed on his, and Steve can still hear the hint of Ireland- of her home- in his mother’s voice. He hears it in the curve of the long ‘i’ sound, the missing ‘th’s. He pretends to know what she means, what she wants from him, to go to high school and _do_ something, and _be_ something.

“‘Course, Ma,” he says. He’s ten and bright-eyed, and he wants to map out the world, or maybe sketch it with charcoal. “You came here, that’s why, right? So I could get to school and get a job and buy us some big place somewhere?”

Sarah Rogers smiles, but not with her teeth.

Steve knows, later, that she came here to build a life for herself. Maybe nurse in the war or a hospital, save lives- Buck always said he had that urge, same as his mother. She even met a perfect American man, a soldier, Joseph Rogers. And that she did, save lives, but in the end it cost hers. Steve knows he was never part of the plan, that Sarah never wanted a sickly child with a crooked spine. The cruel universe spun on its axis one last time for Sarah Rogers and took away all she had worked for, one by one until it was all gone: her husband, her money, and then, when she was bleak and hungry, it took her life.

But he doesn’t know any of this now, in the summer of 1928. He’s just barely met Bucky in a bleak New York schoolyard, and the taste of better times is still resonant in his mouth.

“Come on Steve,” Sarah says, affectionately. His eyelids are drooping, tired, but still his mother’s thin hands pull him outside, into their small square of the world. The side yard is tired, like him, but he can see all of Brooklyn- at least, all of Brooklyn that matters- from here. Tall apartment buildings crowd his vision, next to a couple of small houses like their own. A corner store with flags hanging from the window sits next to a mostly abandoned barbershop. Muted neutrals color the world, except for the flash or red lips on a flapper girl with her head down, or a bright orange in the grip of a tiny child.

“What’s it, Ma?” he murmurs. Sleep is starting to catch hold.

“Look up at that,” she says, and tilts his head up towards the direction of the bay. He can’t see the statue, not even close, but he sees some poster, peeling off the brick of a building yards away. On the poster, Lady Liberty winks over at them, the worn out immigrant and her spindly son. “I want you to remember, Steve, I want you to remember this: it doesn’t always work out for the people that come here. Some of them- Steve, are you listening?- some of them end up chained to factories, with burnt faces, or lost without a family. But I want you to know it worked. For me, I mean. I got you, Steven.” She says all this, and Steve sees the wear of decades on her young face. Young, now, because she is still made of hope. Somehow, the world has beaten her down with its relentless fists, and she still stands up and sees that statue and smiles.

He doesn’t respond because he doesn’t understand, just gives a sleepy nod, and she returns him a sad smile. Summer blows by, in a breeze and in the setting of the sun. But they stay there, Sarah and Steve, the unwanted, the Irish, the Americans. Steve never tells her, but he makes a promise that day, in his ten year-old mind.

He will be something, someday, just like his mother wants. He’ll look out his window and see the statue lady, her real self, with her rusted copper shiny like a new penny. He’ll buy his mother all the buttermilk she wants. He won’t be a secret anymore.

And like a penny thrown to the ground for good luck, this dream comes to be, but it twists so much- heads, tails, heads, tails- that when it does, he can’t be sure of what it is, or what he is, at all anymore.

 

1929

 _Tap, tap, tap_. Fingers drum across the window, slick with rain.

Steve jumps up from the sketch he has been drawing and runs to the door, hands still gritty with pencil shavings. He pulls it open, and a mess of rainwater, dark hair, and winter coats runs into the house. Sensing impending disaster, he dives across the room to rescue his drawing from the water flying everywhere, but the kitchen table and Sarah’s lacy place settings suffer a soggy fate. The boy reaches up and pushes back his dark hood, shaking off the rain in full, wet droplets. Familiar gray eyes finally emerge from the coats and flicker down at Steve.

“Hey, Bucky,” he says. The corners of the boy’s mouth turn up and his eyes narrow like he’s incredulous he was recognized.

“The only,” he spits back, ripe with that Brooklyn accent. “Where’s Sarah?” After a tense first meeting when Steve’s mother insisted that ‘Mrs. Rogers’ made her seem like a grandmother who was wasting away, Bucky had settled on a permanent and comfortable “Sarah.”

“Same as always: working,” Steve says. “Typhus patients, this time.” Sarah always returns home from the wards with angry, sad eyes, and she tells Steve about them: how the world is just letting them suffer and waste away. No vaccine, no medicine, no cure but the sweet arms of death.

“Whatcha drawing?” Buck asks suddenly, jumping off the chair. Steve pulls the paper in his hands away from Bucky’s greedy eyes and hands. Crossing his arms defensively, the dark-haired boy tilts his chin up. “Not gonna show me, huh?”

“No!” Steve answers quickly, then continues, “No, it’s just… I’m not finished.” He clutches the drawing tighter, even though he knows the pencil and charcoal will just smear beneath his anxious fingers.

Hurt, Bucky returns to shaking the rain off of himself. After emptying a veritable basin of rainwater from his jacket and hair, he turns back to Steve. “So, you up for baseball?”

“You’ve got to be kidding, Buck; it’s a monsoon out there!” Steve protests, gesturing towards the downpour of rain just outside the stained white curtains.

“Aw, a little rain never hurt anyone,” Bucky insists. “Besides, Sarah’s not here, and I know you want to. Steve Rogers, worried about trouble?”

Steve shakes his head. “‘Course not. I just don’t want to be cold and wet and miserable all day, ’s all.” He slides his drawing onto one of the paint-peeling shelves behind him. “Anyone else in the neighborhood up for it, you think?”

“Nah, they ain’t got stamina like us,” Bucky asserts, reaching a thin hand out to pat Steve on the back, affectionately. Steve squints back at him.

“You even know what stamina means, Barnes?” Bucky laughs, a glorious sound. One, two, three wool coats go back on his skinny body. When Steve doesn’t make a move to do the same, Bucky removes one of his and wraps it around Steve. The dark wool scratches his skin, but his ribs and lungs thank Bucky for the warmth. It’s like this: his body is always reaching out for heat and safety, when it’s cold in Brooklyn and the snow wants to blanket every window with its cold powder. But he can never find it, simply because there isn’t enough skin on his body to keep his bones from freezing inside out.

“Rain’s a’wasting, Rogers,” Buck says, and he’s gone out the door in a flash. Steve sighs, but the adrenaline is already pounding in his veins. As fast as his skinny legs and curved backbone will carry him, he chases Buck, out of his Ma’s brand new tiny house, past the corner store and the swaying, soaking lines of laundry, and into the Brooklyn grid.

Steve catches him just past Poplar Street with rain droplets caught between his eyelashes. Bucky’s already on his hands and knees, searching for the baseball and bat they’ve buried beneath the knot of a tiny maple. Once he finds it, Buck is on his feet in all of a second.

“Gotten faster, have you?” Buck asks. Steve tries to grin, but he has to stop to let his heavy breaths settle. Bucky knows- knows about it all, his twisted spine and crooked bones and something called ‘ulcers’ that makes his stomach feel like its being spun inside out like cotton candy at an amusement park. And the brilliant thing is this: he doesn’t care. No one pushes Steve further than the Brooklyn boy with messy dark hair and smoky eyes. No one else would make him ride the Cyclone at Coney Island until he retched over the side (four times). No one else would shovel Sarah Roger’s sticky potatoes in his mouth at ten miles a minute and implore Steve to do the same. No one else would play baseball with him in the rain and run through New York like it’s an open country road.

“Let’s play,” Steve responds, when he can catch air again. Buck’s twelve-year old mouth curls, and between one breath and the next he is standing at the plate (a discarded, waterlogged _Brooklyn Daily Eagle_ ), with the bat in his hand.

The bottoms of his flat feet are aching; a thin strand of pain runs from each toe to the heel, and the result pulses up through his legs. Steve know he shouldn’t run, shouldn’t do much of anything, really. But Bucky calls him, and so he follows.

“Bring it on, Rogers.”

Steve may not be strong or tall, but he’s watched enough baseball at Ebbets Field to know how to throw a mean curveball. He beats the dusty baseball against his small palm and takes the ball between his fingertips. Bucky twists the bat in his hands. The rain is like a hungry Dodgers’ crowd: endless and loud, taunting them. Squeezing the baseball, Steve imagines the dust on his fingers is simply extra charcoal flaking off of a drawing. This ball is his paintbrush, and he’s going to hone it and use it like a weapon. Steve fixes his eyes on Buck’s.

“Let’s see what you got, Barnes.” Before he can retort, Steve whips the ball across the plate, and water must go everywhere in Brooklyn Heights when the dripping ball leaves his fingers. Bucky swings quick, down, with all his strength, but it’s not enough. All of his effort is air as the ball rockets past and bounces into the mud nearby. Triumphant, Steve gives a small cheer of victory and pumps his fist. Bucky lets out a laugh that sounds like a sigh, then another, and then stops. His eyes quirk, once, twice, as he stares down at the ground. Then the world falls beneath him and he stumbles to the ground. The wooden bat falls to the side, forgotten.

The rain is gathering in puddles and rivers and lakes around them.

“Buck?” Steve runs to his friend’s side as the baseball rolls down the road, dangerously close to a grate. But like their bat, it’s left neglected as Steve kneels down by Bucky’s side. “What’s the matter? Was my curve too much for you?”

Bucky doesn’t smile. Slowly, he reaches down to the ground and takes the newspaper between his fingers.

“Hey, what? You can’t just pick up home plate, Buck. I—“

“It’s from today,” he says slowly, carefully. His eyes are big and gray, and they fix on Steve’s. “It’s from today, look.” Buck swipes the water from the dissolving stack of paper and points down at the headline.

“Stocks sink,” Steve reads, eyes scanning the page, “Rally; thousands watch silently and hope?” he finishes. “What is this?”

Buck is shaking his head, slowly, repeatedly, angrily. “This,” he says, “this is not good. My father’s work…” he trails off, head sinking. He’s on both knees, with his eyes cast down and shoulders hunched over. His white shirt sticks to his pale skin everywhere except the thin strap of his brown suspenders.

“Hey. Hey, Bucky. It’s probably fine; it’s probably nothing.” Steve reassures him. The paper falls to the pavement beneath their feet and bent knees, knocking together as the rain falls in a silent veil. Bucky doesn’t respond. “You still want to play? I’m always ready to show you who’s boss,” he asks, gently, competitively, but his friend doesn’t smile.

“Bucky, come on,” Steve asks, helplessly.

“No, you come one, Steve! My father’s entire life could be compromised. Those are his stocks, I know ‘cause I’ve seen what he does, and this is the whole of America—“

Steve hears it, or sees, it maybe, before Bucky can finish: the screech of tires, the flash of lights, and the water splashing out in a torrent.

“Watch out!” Steve doesn’t know who says it, which of the two of them screamsfirst. But hands are flinging out, feet scraping against the road, and they are running, or stumbling, or crawling to the edge of the street. Black pavement beneath them fades into the dirt of the sidewalk. The car roars past, and Steve and Bucky are left drenched on the side of the road, but alive.

“Fucking flivver,” Bucky breathes after the receding shadow.

“Watch your mouth!” Steve retorts, instinctively, then realizes his mistake. Buck looks over at him, hair sticking up from the rain, eyes wild, like he’s crazy.

“Did you just…” he trails off and lets out a short burst of a laugh. “Steve Rogers, did you just tell me off for cursing?”

“You’re twelve!”

“And you’re fucking eleven. Better?”

Their laughs come easy after that, breathless and soaking on the sidewalk. But before either of them can speak again or say anything about the newspaper, the quiet sound of footsteps rumbles from behind them, from the same direction as the car.

The people aren’t far behind the noise, holding their money in their fists and crying out. They move like a storm, even through the rain, all hats and stomping feet and black coats. No money, they cry. Where are the stocks, they ask. The cars have no answer. Steve has no answer. The city is loud, but even its stormy streets have no answer for the crowd.

When the people leave, finally, their mob trickling out of Brooklyn, Steve can speak again.

“Buck?” he asks, tentatively. Bucky’s chest is heaving, and he points out into the street.

“Our bat is ruined, Stevie. And I don’t even know where the ball went.” He’s upset, with his eyebrows scrunched together in an effort not to cry. Even his shoulders are crunched up near his ears, and his suspenders fall loosely down his back. It’s so awful that Steve even forgives the use of the nickname.

“Bucky, I don’t care about the bat or the ball. I mean… what I mean is, are you alright? Do you need to go home? Of course you need to go home. Your father, I mean.” Steve is stumbling, faltering over his words. Quiet, Buck just stares out at the road, where the bat is crumpled and bent and the newspaper is torn to shreds.

Across the nations, headlines scream: “Market crash,” “Severe collapse,” “Bottom reached!” Somewhere, Sarah Rogers is told to go home, that her pretty hands are no use in the hospital anymore. She shakes her head and her work-weathered palms, and leaves. The Barneses lose a fortune in a day, vanished behind closed bank windows and empty accounts.

“Hey Steve, you think this will last long?” Bucky asks the next day, when the stocks still haven’t risen. Steve shakes his head.

“It won’t be long, Bucky. They’ll be back.”

Later, when Bucky has to search for a job at twelve years old, when there are no jobs left anywhere in New York, when Steve’s mother starts leaving home less because there’s nowhere to work, to _go,_ when the color gray hangs constant over Brooklyn, and America is broken down into helpless splinters too afraid and beaten down to do anything at all, Steve feels the weight of the lie.

 

1933

 _Poor_ is a word Steve knows well: he knows its insides and outsides, its darkness and shine like a pair of brand new Oxfords. He knows poor is what he is, but he also knows there are men and women outside the walls of his tiny house who don’t have a home, who use newspaper bits to make blankets they can’t purchase, who beg and beg for food from an unforgiving government and a God who won’t help them. So when his Ma brings home food, anything at all, be it potato skins or crusts of bread or spoonfuls of cold soup, Steve thanks every divinity in this universe that he and his mother have lived another day.

Bucky is rich, the only way a person can be wealthy when there’s no money left to have. His father’s stocks disappeared, and back in 1929 Bucky thought that was the end of everything. But he has older siblings with jobs and money stored at his home and luck and food, so much of it that he can have full meals three times a day, so much luxury he could wring it from a towel and sip it for a drink. Every morning, Bucky brings cans of soup and pieces of bread and sometimes even chunks of fruit. Fruit! And every day, Steve says no, we have enough, and Buck calls him a stubborn idiot and leaves the food there on the kitchen table. Sarah comes home from whatever patchwork jobs she has managed to procure for the day, sees the food, and sighs. It’s a sigh that’s full of sadness and the feeling that this is wrong and backwards: a 17 year-old boy shouldn’t be providing for two families. But it’s also a sigh that has rarely seen real, genuine help. A sigh that knows to accept it. So Sarah puts Bucky’s fresh provisions next to the rations she’s found at the soup kitchen, and they pretend that the two portions are equal. They pretend they could survive without him.

There are days, though, when Bucky arrives empty-handed, because no one is really _rich,_ not now. And today is one of those days.

“Sorry, Steve.” Bucky is already apologizing when he walks in the door. Shaking his head, Steve pulls out a chair for Buck at the kitchen table. You don’t have to provide for us, Steve wants to say. He doesn’t.

“Hey, you been watching the Dodgers lately, Barnes?”

Bucky snorts. “Yeah, and they suck.”

“Nah, Johnny Frederick’s gonna carry Brooklyn to the title,” Steve says, assuredly. Buck laughs this time.

“In your- our- dreams. You do your math homework?”

“ _Math_ homework? I’m no punk, Bucky.”

“What does that even mean?” Bucky drums his fingers on the kitchen table with a small laugh. “Keep this up and they’ll kick you out of high school at fifteen.”

“Good. I can get a job hauling food cans up at the grocer and then sneak a few extra jars of peaches for us, huh?”

“Peaches?” Buck leans back in his chair, and his hair falls in his eyes. “That’s a bigger dream than the Dodgers winning the Series.”

“Boys!” Both heads turn up to see calls Sarah Rogers standing in the doorway. Her thin, wiry frame almost fills the tiny space, and the light from outside casts a dim halo around her. On the muscle of her upper arm, Steve can see the red imprint from an insulin injection, the first in a few months. “I’m going to work. Please don’t be the cause if the neighborhood burns down.”

Bucky’s spine goes stick straight and solemn, and he nods like a soldier. “Of course, ma’am.” Sarah looks over at Steve, then back to Buck.

“Don’t give me that, James Barnes. I know you’re the troublemaker.” Buck goes wide-eyed, but before he can retort, she is gone out the door, arms swinging and clothing ripping in the wind. Stifling a laugh, Steve looks over at his friend.

“Troublemaker, that’s you.”

“Oh, shut up,” Bucky responds. “You’ve got twice the trouble in you and everyone knows it.”

“Hm… then why am I acing art and writing with flying colors? Why do the teachers all seem to like me?” Steve asks, blinking sweetly. Buck shakes his head, all that dark hair swinging around for a moment.

“‘Cause you’re good at faking it, Rogers. You’ve never followed a damn rule in your life, you know that?”

Steve grins. “I don’t know, the evidence seems to be on my side. They all think I’m an angel.”

“Yeah, well you’re really just another rioting Brooklyn kid. You just know how to fake it like you’ve got heart, that’s all,” Bucky fires back, laughing.

His smile only grows, infected by Buck’s pretend anger and eyebrows raised in challenge. Fifteen and fourteen suit them well, respectively, and even difficult classes and stress and age haven’t drawn them apart. Most mornings in the Rogers house are so full of Bucky that he seems to live here: he’s in the arguments, in Steve’s drawings, and in their kitchen waiting each day. Still, even thought Steve knows Sarah is grateful to Buck, Steve’s mother still complains about him, always “that Barnes boy,” or “your little friend James.” It’s her strange affection, manifesting itself in half-hearted irritation. Maybe she pities him or maybe she simply wants to pay him back for all he’s done, but where Bucky’s parents aren’t often there for him, Sarah steps in. Money and food are one thing, and a pretty big thing in the ‘30s. But there’s a reason Bucky comes to their tiny home every morning instead of inviting to Steve to his own, more of a reason than his daily food runs.

Outside, morning is rising like a wave on the ocean. A couple minutes more and Brooklyn Heights will be awake, but for now the neighborhood is still and quiet. Clothing drifts abandoned on laundry lines, patched jackets and pants and ripped, yellowing shirts. Their minute movements making empty sounds on the breeze. The half sunrise reflects off the warm ground.

“School, then?” Buck asks. “We don’t have to. We could go to Coney Island and ride every ride there; it would be a worthier use of our time.”

“Aw, like you would ever go for that. You know you love school,” Steve says, “Though, your proposal is tempting. Let me grab my things.” He runs back to the second room in the small house, the place he shares with his mother. A single lamp usually provides a pitiful light from the corner, but it’s turned off. Instead, near darkness falls over the single bed, chest of drawers, writing desk, and chair. Near the lamp, Sarah Rogers keeps her few things: a Bible from Ireland, his father’s rosary, and a wooden box containing all the money they’ve saved up.

Already heaving his school bag from the wooden floor onto his wiry shoulders, Steve glances around the room one more time. His eyes catch on a piece of paper protruding from the 4-drawer chest: a drawing. It could be from years ago, or yesterday, but when Steve yanks it from the drawer’s hold, he recognizes it.

The charcoal and gray pencil trace a Brooklyn sunset, and facing it is the silhouette of ten year old Bucky Barnes, back turned like he has a secret. It’s crudely drawn, not his best work at all, but the lines are true. He sees Bucky in it, reckless and free, before the Depression took that life and tried to grind it to dust beneath its fingertips.

“Steve!” Buck hollers from the kitchen. Steve, transfixed, ignores him and tries to reconcile this portrait with the boy standing in the kitchen right now. There’s the same dark, kind of greasy hair, the gray eyes and jawline, same mouth shape and small nose. Steve reaches out to wipe away a scrap of pencil shaving and notices something: the drawing isn’t finished. A hollow space remains next to Bucky, barely noticeable. In it Steve couldn’t fit anything except for this: a wisp of a boy with trouble in his eyes. The shadow of Steve is missing, and Bucky stands alone in the sunset.

“Steve!” Bucky cries out again. Steve knows why he hid this drawing from Bucky, and every single page from over the years with Bucky’s features in them. It’s strange: he shares everything with Bucky, but some part of him won’t allow him to share this. Maybe he’s afraid of what Bucky would say, if he opened Steve’s drawing pad and saw all of the likenesses of him: Bucky at ten, twelve, fifteen years old, Bucky sitting on Steve’s bed in a striped shirt and boat shoes, Bucky dancing on the edge of the pier, Bucky bored in class and Bucky in the rain.

The truth is, Steve has only ever wanted to sketch people, really. And he’s drawn Sarah hundreds of times, but it always breaks his heart to see her sadness so clearly splayed out on a page. Maybe it’s easier, then, for him to draw Buck, to trace out his youth and happiness with the dark charcoal.

Maybe he’s still lying to himself, but he hides the drawing in the drawer regardless.

“Ready?” Bucky asks, when he steps back into the kitchen, knapsack flung over his shoulder.

“Nope,” answers Steve, and he pushes open the creaky wooden door.

Spring in Brooklyn has never been bright, but at the least the muted colors of winter are gone. Light shines everywhere; in each dark corner and crevice, the morning sun has found a way in. And the sounds: of automobiles and children and the scrape of worn out soles as people line up for the soup kitchen. Steve and Bucky walk through the neighborhood, and everywhere the Depression sticks out at them. The spring light is too bright, almost, for the tattered people on stoops, for the tent camps and broken radios and newspaper scraps.

They make it to George Washington High School just in time for the first class, and Steve is already hurting from the walk. Bucky doesn’t need to know- Steve can take it, really. But his back is crunching with every step, and worse, the muscles in his leg feel awful and useless.

“Race you to writing?” Bucky asks, excitement in his eyes. Their first period class is ages away, and Steve can imagine the exact journey through five hallways and four staircases it will take to get there. Light from the ceiling spills onto Bucky’s dull gray school clothing, and he looks almost angelic, with a grin stretched over his features. Again, as he always is, Steve is filled with the desire to draw Bucky, to sketch the dark outline of him, bathed in light. “Rogers?” he asks again, and Steve blinks back into the present.

“‘Course,” he answers weakly, because who is he to deny the smile on Buck’s face, the rush of competition, the heart-pounding race? It doesn’t matter that his body is giving up on him, that it hurts just to walk. It doesn’t matter, because he owes it to Bucky, at least, who keeps his scrawny physique from succumbing to hollow and starving. He owes it to his friend.

So Steve runs- lopsided and painful, but still- until they make it to their classroom and slide into adjacent seats.

“I… win,” Steve huffs out between hurried breaths. Bucky just shakes his head, and opens his mouth to speak. But the teacher, somehow sensing an impending disturbance in his classroom, strides over and smacks Bucky over the head with his newspaper.

It’s all Steve can do to stifle a laugh. Furious, Bucky returns a crude gesture to the teacher’s back, then turns to Steve, scribbles something on a scrap of paper, and places it in Steve’s palm.

_I still won, punk._

The loopy, left-handed writing is incorrect, but Steve just shakes his head. Focusing his attention on the pain in his back, he tries to narrow it, the way his mother has taught him: _Reduce it to one place. Feel it there, and nowhere else. Don’t let it control you._

It’s a technique Sarah learned from trying to control her own overwhelming fatigue from the diabetes: the funneling of the pain and the aching down into one singular spot, a pin through her spine. They trade places, mother and son; half the time Steve is the one with a hand on her back while she vomits cleanly into the toilet until the skin around her mouth turns rough. The rest of the time, Sarah massages his muscles slowly with her thin fingers or slowly forces water down his throat when it gets hard to breathe.

But Steve can’t control his pain now, because the hurting echoes up and down his spine until it’s hard even to see straight. He won’t tell Bucky, and he won’t even tell his Ma it’s gotten this bad. He can’t ever tell them about all this pain, in his back, in his legs, in his lungs and stomach, in _everywhere._ It’s a weight he has to carry, and it’s a burden that belongs to him. Not to his family- to his Ma, or to Buck. Even when his skin feels red hot and his vision slides out of focus because all he can see or feel or think of is the pulsing in his spine. Even when ulcers in his stomach threaten to rip out the lining of his belly and leave the inside parts of him on the pavement. Even when every step feels like a spike is driving deeper and deeper inside him, tearing him apart, even getting to his lungs, because he can’t breathe, can’t even cough or wheeze, can’t see, can’t feel, can’t—

“Steve.”

Bucky is looking over at him. The teacher is speaking, somewhere, but Steve can’t hear him. He only sees Buck.

“You okay?” he asks. _No_ , says his body.

“Yeah, of course.”

It’s a rough time, but here is the final truth, the mantra that Steve has reasoned himself into believing: everyone has other problems. Better problems than his broken muscles and the bones in his spine grinding against one another. It rains, the stocks are gone, no one has a job or food or a home, Bucky has to help his family, it stops raining, and Steve is fine.

He is. He has to be.

 

1936: _Do you remember when we first met? (I kind of like this letter writing idea. It helps me, you know- therapeutic, is that the word?) I remember it. I was nine and you were ten and it was before the Depression. It feels like all other memories I have of before the Depression: a hell of a lot better. More colorful, maybe. The air didn’t taste like soot and sadness. We were in the schoolyard, and there you were in all of your skinny nine-year old glory. I knew you, sort of: you were the boy who always picked fights and always lost. I had seen you bruised by our classmate’s fists more than a few times, and for stupid things, too. You always had that stupid brave streak. That day, a couple ‘a boys who must have been twice your size were surrounding you, asking for your lunch money or schoolwork or something like that. You looked ready to fight ‘em all off: cheeks flushed red and fists tensed to go flying. And then of course they were all over you in a couple seconds and that fight got pummeled down real fast. I could have stepped in then. But I think I was mesmerized. I couldn’t stop watching you, because they kept teasing you and hitting you and your face was bloody and you stood up again and again until the ground was shaky beneath your feet and I don’t think you could see anymore but you were still standing up._

_That’s how I met you and how I’ll always know you: the gangly little Brooklyn kid whose shoes are two sizes too big and won’t back down from a fight. Ever._

_After those boys left you alone, and you were still trying to stand up, that’s when I went over. Call me crazy: maybe I had a death wish, befriending you. Maybe I still do. But when I came over you were all ready to beat me up too: fists balled and eyes wide. I told you to go ahead, and you looked all confused at me. I said go ahead, I’ve seen what you can do. Go ahead and throw a few. And so you did, and I stood there and took it until you stopped because I wasn’t fighting back. That’s one thing you could never do: fight someone defenseless. It’s ad-mi-ra-ble, Steve. It really is. But what drew me to you in the first place, huh, was your fight. God, you’ll fight anyone, but it’s not because you’re angry like some people: like my older brother Trevor, he’s got all that fury crammed inside him. No, you’re so sure of yourself and your world and your morals that you don’t get angry, you just fight everything that hurts you or hurts anyone else, which happens to be authority, most of the time. You’ve gotten bloody knuckles too many times because you wouldn’t back down. It’s the principle of the matter, you tell me. The principle of the matter is stupid and courageous, then, just like you._

_I think it was easier to make friends back then when we were smaller. We had to, and we had to stick together. After that day, Steve, you and I were like magnets. The world was telling us to stick with each other, I think. You needed me, when those boys came back with bigger fists and bigger words. And I needed you to teach me how to fight, not with my fists, but with my ideas. (And fists after the fact)._

_My sister Rebecca used to talk about destiny a lot, usually in the context of her locating a suitable man to court and marry, but that’s besides the point. Destiny scares me, that’s what’s important. It’s this huge, unknowable thing, but it’s also in our brains and beneath our fingertips and behind our curtains. It’s waiting for us, Steve, and that makes me afraid. Maybe fate brought us together, like spinning magnets across time and space, impossible to deter from our inevitable path towards each other. Maybe destiny has some plan for us. Or maybe all of this is a mistake, and we’ve just been falling towards each other in a cosmic accident for nine years._

_Something happened, and I saw you in the schoolyard in 1927. Something happened, and the world’s axis shifted a tiny bit. And now? Now we’re spinning around each other, orbiting closer and closer until our systems touch and implode the universe. I don’t understand you, Steve, and I don’t understand myself. But when I reached out that day, let you pummel me, let our cosmic paths collide: when I did that, I think I made some destiny. Our destiny. Just a tiny bit._

_It sounds good, doesn’t it?_ Our _destiny._

 

1936: _It’s August now, that sweaty month between your birthday and Christmas. August used to taste like fresh fruit- oranges and apples and peaches. Now, it just tastes like the resilient Brooklyn heat under my tongue. I’ve been living on my own ever since last May, when I finally graduated from George Washington. Don’t get me wrong, I loved going to school with you, but now I’m finally away from my parents. I can just… live. (And work, too, unfortunately). And now that you’ve graduated, you’re free too, just like me. Of course, Sarah’s going to make you get a job as soon as she can find one for you; you’re shot, basically, because she’s not going to find one no matter where she looks, so she’ll make you work as a nurse for her or something._

_Do you ever wonder if this “depression,” like they’re calling it, will end? It’s been seven years- count ‘em like the coins that we don’t have. How much longer does America sit on its heels while we get poorer and poorer? Steve, I can’t remember the last time I had real money I could spend, not just a few cents to get enough food to survive. Where’d all the money go, huh? Where are all the jobs?_

_Sarah says she’s seen worse, in Ireland. She says it’ll be over soon, while she squeezes her last bit of income into a couple of potatoes to feed you. When does it end? When do we run out of food completely? When do we stop being desperate and start being completely screwed?_

_You might already be completely in trouble. You can’t lie to me; I see the pain in your eyes when you run, even when you’re just breathing sometimes. Sarah can’t even afford a doctor for herself, but I know if she could get one she’d make him look at you first. She says you were a small baby, but not sickly until you got a little older and contracted scarlet fever, which almost burned right through you. After that, every illness in the book decided to rain down on you at once, and I can see it on your face. You don’t have to hide it; you don’t have to shoulder it alone. Let me carry it with you, at least. I wish you would let me._

_My apartment’s all dark, and a blue Brooklyn storm has taken up residence outside the window. It’s making the sky look black and fluid, like it’s moving with the pouring raindrops. No thunder, though, just the occasional ruining lightning strike._

_I miss your scrawny little fire, even though you walked with me to work today. It’s too quiet here._

 

1936

Steve has always grasped tomorrow in his mind. It’s quite a solid concept, and it has always involved Steve saying goodbye to his mother, waiting for Bucky to arrive, and walking to school. Now that Buck has his own place and Steve has graduated, he goes to Bucky’s apartment most of the time. Sometimes he tries to work, or they go off to the city. There’s the sunset and the Brooklyn Heights noise, because nothing is ever quiet in New York. There’s food and warmth if he’s lucky.

Steve has always grasped tomorrow in his mind, until today.

Two months ago, Sarah Rogers found a job as a nurse a tuberculosis ward. It was good work, paid twice as much as she was earning before, paid enough to give the landlord a full payment and put full meals on the table for a couple days.

Now, Steve sees the price of that luxury laid out plain in front of him.

His mother is sick, her lungs infected and eyes red as she breathes quietly and unsteadily. The room he shares with her is dark and empty, except for the horrible sound of her lungs rattling. The lamp’s poor light bounces off of the peeling wall and glows in the near silence.

“Ma,” he says, slowly. He’s afraid, maybe, that every word he says to her will be the last. “Ma, how is it?”  
Sarah breathes in, once, twice, and meets his eyes. “I’m fine,” she tells him. Three broken coughs spill off her lips. “Water?” she asks, weakly.

Steve turns away and as soon as he is sure she cannot see him, closes his eyes for just a moment. He is eighteen years old, and he is fairly certain that he shouldn’t be seeing his mother like this. He shouldn’t have to see her like this at all. Running to the kitchen, he grabs a glass and fills it to the brim with warm water. Then, he returns to his mother’s side as quick as his skinny legs will take him there.

“Here, Ma,” he says, and he pushes the glass into her hands. They are hard, rough hands that carried a nation or two, that carried him as an infant. Now, they are shaking hands. Taking the glass, she offers a cough as a thank you. Steve feels something inside himself welling up, threatening to spill over like the water in the glass. His heart is beating slow in his chest, but his breaths fall over each other, each aching to get out.

“Where’ Joseph?” she asks. For a moment, all Steve can do is look down at her.

“He’s not here, Ma,” he answers quietly.

“Jamie?” Her older brother James, left in Ireland as a failing farmer, died of typhus when Steve was only four years old, and Sarah’s family had sent a short telegram devoid of emotion: JAMES HAS PASSED STOP

“Ma,” he says softly. “It’s me, Steve. I’m here.”

Sarah Rogers leans back against her pillow and begins to rasp out several more coughs. Steve remembers, like it’s a movie reel, learning about TB in school: _“an infectious disease in the lungs, usually fatal.”_ He sees pictures and diagrams of red ans swollen lungs. Those lungs didn’t look like they would bring air in. They didn’t look like anything. They looked ruined and wrong. And the worst part is, he can reconcile those awful pictures with his mother’s wheezing breaths and coughs as she breathes her life away. She’s not even old, just in her forties. It was a cruel, cruel fate that brought tuberculosis down into her lungs.

“Steve,” she says, suddenly. He jerks up and faces her. Dark circles pulse under her blue eyes, ringed with red. Her skin wrinkles and unwrinkles between breaths, and her blonde bangs fall down in front of her gaze.

“Yes, Ma?”

“How are you, Steve?” she asks softly. Underneath her right eye, a small tear slides down against the smooth skin.

“I’m okay, Ma,” he whispers. “Bucky’s got a real job down at the docks now, you know. He says he might be able to convince the owner to let me work there too, if we’re lucky.”

She’s not really listening, now, but Steve keeps talking.

“And guess what, the election just ended and we’ve still got the same president, Roosevelt. And Mayor La Guardia’s not so bad, either, you think? I mean, if either of them could feed the city, that would be great, but we can’t have everything.

“Yesterday, it stormed and it must have snowed twelve feet. Bucky and me could barely make it across the street from his apartment to the corner store, and when we got there we realized we only had a couple of nickels and no dimes, so we couldn’t get any music or a sandwich either. Bucky just said we should go back, but we decided to talk to the girl behind the counter, and she was awfully nice. A looker, too, but I don’t think she much liked either of us. Anyways, we went home then and tried to get warm.”

“Steven,” she says, again, and Steve shuts up. Her face is white. Bucky once told him that his mother was too strong for this world. He wonders, awfully, if this is the world proving that no one is stronger than it. Waiting for her to continue, he reaches out and takes her pale hand.

But Sarah Rogers does not say anything else. She doesn’t cough or wheeze again. Steve squeezes her hand, expectant, trying to meet her evasive eyes.

 

_Steve doesn’t get to remember the day his father died, because he wasn’t alive. He only gets a few war photographs and that goddamned impossible rosary. He only gets to live the pain through his mother, or not at all. He doesn’t even have grandparents to count on, not from either side. And if they died, he wouldn’t know to mourn them. No siblings either, like Bucky has. He has his Ma and he has Bucky. The only other people in his life: friends at school, neighbors, the bald landlord and his stick-thin wife- they don’t count, any of them, because if they died he wouldn’t be broken, just sad until it passed. And it’s awful to say, but it’s true._

_People always ask him how he gets on, without a father. And he answers- I’ve got a mother. I’ve got her. I’ve got enough._

 

The air has been silent for too long. Steve’s heartbeat catches, once, twice, then races. _No._ He squeezes her hand again, takes her other hand, holds them close. _No._ His eyes are fixed on hers, and his tiny body is tense, shaking. _No._

Sarah Rogers does not breathe again.

There’s a scream inside him that wants out.

Instead, he asks, “Ma?” And it’s not the anger inside him, the desperation or the denial that breaks him. It’s the silence. It’s the glass of water slipping from her hand and spilling out over her white dress. It’s everything.

Steve leans over her and looks into her pale blue eyes, fixed somewhere he can never see. He lets go of her hand and wraps his arms around her, pulling her as close as he can. She smells like the sickness, the awful weight of it and the disgusting taste of blood. He can’t smell his mother: Irish boxty and that one cheap bottle of perfume she was so proud of. She is empty.

He cannot scream, but he falls to the ground beside the bed. He cannot scream, but he feels every tear inside him start to fight its way to the surface. He cannot scream, because no one on this block, in this city, not on this whole goddamn planet could make a sound loud enough to fill this terrible silence.

Steve remembers her, in cut fragments and shards of life. Cooking potatoes in the kitchen, slicing vegetables back when she could get them easily, running out the door to work, sitting outside with him and looking at the ruined New York sky, holding him close, scolding him and Bucky, looking down at a picture of his father, alone, gazing out at the world like she understood it all and didn’t want to. He remembers her with blood pumping through her veins and eyelids falling down and rising up and blue irises darting around and her lungs gently moving beneath her chest. He remembers her alive, alive, alive. He remembers her stories, of Ireland, of the boat over, of Joseph Rogers, of the war, of Brooklyn, of him as a child. He remembers the way she missed her home. He remembers her looking out at protesters in the streets, wistfully. He remembers all of this. He only forgets one thing: the broken, fallen woman who has occupied this bed for the past three weeks.

Sarah has told him, many times, that being an immigrant is hard and being the child of an immigrant might be even harder. Now she has told him this, again, with her last actions, with all she had left to give. She worked hard her whole life to come here and she worked hard when she got here and all the world gave her was death.

Steve chokes on that word, because it cannot fit his mother; but it does fit her, and now it will for eternity, for the rest of his lifetime until his chest falls one last time like hers has. And the one thought that he allows himself, the one selfish thing permitted in his mind, is that he will be with her soon. That he’s not stupid and he knows there’s something wrong with his broken back and legs. That he won’t live forever, that he’ll probably be dead in ten years or less. It’s the worst thing he’s ever let himself think.

 

Now Steve doesn’t know tomorrow. He doesn’t know how to wake up and be alone, how to go to the landlord and say he has no way left to pay the bill. He doesn’t know how to tell Bucky or think about school in the future or pick up a pencil and draw. He has lost his grip on the next day, and the next, and the next. But that’s the cruelest thing, isn’t it? The world does not stop, even if Steve can no longer face it or think about it or count the minutes ticking away on his mother’s clock. The world, unaware that it has committed this unspeakable sin, does what it always has done. It goes on.

 

1936: _I’m sorry, Stevie. I’m so, so sorry._

 

1937

It has been 232 days since his mother’s death. 225 days since Steve started staying at Buck’s apartment and her funeral. 131 days since he has returned to school- at Auburndale Art School, in Brooklyn. And 4 days since he last saw Bucky.

 _Where the hell are you, Buck?_ The apartment is empty, except for Steve’s too small clothes and space in the sheets. 4 days is enough to blow away the lingering scent of Buck’s cigarettes and the sickening smell of his cologne. It’s enough for the dirty dishes in the kitchen to dwindle down to one each day, if that. It’s enough to suck every piece of life out of the small space. A warm breeze is invading through the window, across the fire escape. If Steve doesn’t look closely, he can imagine Bucky is sitting out there, legs swinging precariously over the edge with a cigarette dangling between his lips. Steve could sit inside the apartment- “it’s too hot outside, you’ll inhale your death,” quote Bucky- and sketch out Buck’s silhouette against the Brooklyn sky.

But Bucky’s not sitting out there and hasn’t been for four days.

Steve is sitting on the bed, his small shoulders hunched over, elbows on his knees. He counts the cars that drive by outside the window- one, two, three, four, five, lose count, start over- and waits for Bucky to come home. His sketchbook is open and forgotten on their kitchen table. He’s missed four days of homework from Auburndale, because each day after returning home he simply sits on their bed and waits. But Bucky hasn’t come.

A noise awakens his senses, and he looks up, only to see a bird- a pigeon, maybe?- has flown against the closed portion of the window and is now splayed on the fire escape, dead and gone. Steve closes his eyes. He tries not to imagine what his mother would have said about presages.

It’s almost easier for Steve to pretend his mother is still there, still just behind his left shoulder, hovering, thin and translucent. That way, he doesn’t have to miss her entirely. Instead of a hollow, constant ache, he only feels pangs: in the dark, sometimes, or when he notices potatoes or a woman who looks like her (not that Steve sees many women: they aren’t exactly willing to talk to him, not when he barely reaches their shoulders). Now, alone, without Bucky, he can feel the weight of his mother’s—death— pressing down on him. This is what he has been afraid of, he thinks. This is what Bucky has been shielding him from: the crushing weight of _alone,_ of _orphan_. It’s a terrible thing, to look at the world and think: _There might be no one left who cares I exist._

No one left but Bucky, and he’s—

Knocking against the door cuts off his feverish dream, and Steve finally opens his eyes.

“Buck?” he asks, hesitant. Silence, then the knocking continues. “Buck?” Steve repeats, louder. He jumps off of the bed and runs to the door, anticipatory and afraid, then pulls on the doorknob, and Bucky falls in.

“Falls” being the right word, because he’s face-first on the ground before Steve can say another word.

“What the hell? Bucky, are you drunk?” Bucky shifts slightly, turning up to face Steve and seems to realize he’s on the floor. He rolls back on his stomach and props up his elbows, as if he can stay laying on the floor, then changes his mind and muscles his way up to standing.

“Me? No, I’m not…” Bucky trails off and stares right at Steve. His eyes are gray and huge and _red_ around the edges: definitely drunk. “Steve,” he says, and the word is heavy in his mouth.

“Buck,” Steve says back, captivated, then shakes his head. “Bucky, get on the bed- I mean, lie down, you need some water.” Nodding complacently, Bucky falls back over, but this time on the bed. The ground seems to be spinning beneath Steve’s footsteps as he runs to the kitchen, pours a glass of water, and runs back to Bucky. It’s too much like his last night with his mother: the desperation, the confusion, the glass of water between his two pale hands.

When Steve returns, Bucky is curled up in a fetal position, but his eyes are wandering everywhere. He sees Steve and sits up, smiling.

“Brought me water?” he asks.

“Yeah, Buck.” Steve avoids eye contact, keeping his own gaze askance; it’s hard to understand Buck when he’s like this: simple and happy and bleary-eyed and inebriated. He hands over the glass. “So where were you, huh? Did you drink the past four days straight?”

Bucky grins back at him, lopsidedly, as if waiting for someone else to answer the question. Impatient, Steve leans over and gives him a little shove. A part of him wants to slap Bucky right on the face and ask him: _What the hell were you doing? Why’d you leave me alone?_ But the rest of him could never do that, could never watch Bucky’s innocent, drunken smile drop away as quickly as he could spit out those harsh words.

Seeming to realized he’s being questioned, Bucky changes his expression. “I was…” He stops, then seems to grasp hold of his thread of thought again. “I was home,” he says, hushed and serious. Then he leans back and laughs and says it again: “I was home, Steve.”

It’s not dread, exactly, that Steve feels then, but more like wonder. Why? Why go home after he’s been on his own for over two years now? Bucky’s always loved his family, but the relationship has been tense. He admires and loves Rebecca- “call me Becca”- his older sister who’s away at boarding school. He loves his parents too, and his older siblings, but differently, Steve supposes. He doesn’t write them notes at Christmas or visit them at all, really. The last time Steve saw the Barneses- that must have been when Bucky graduated from George Washington, in ’35. His parents sat in the back row and congratulated him after the ceremony was over, but Bucky came home with Sarah and Steve, who had both been sitting in the front. Steve has never known if it is resentment or guilt or apathy that Buck feels towards his parents, but the emotions hang heavy around them whenever he’s in their presence.

“You went to your parents’ place?” Steve asks, directly.

“Well, I went up to see Becca in Jersey,” Bucky says, “But you know me, can’t stomach Jersey for more than a day. I was gonna come here, come home, you see, but Becca convinced me I should come with her. So we went up to the rich part of Brooklyn, you know, the part with the gates and trees that look like they’re brand new from God, and we went to their house.” Bucky is surprisingly lucid for being as far from sober as one can be. As if realizing this error, he stops speaking abruptly.

He reaches out and touches Steve’s nose, right on the bridge where he snapped it trying to defend a cat from some jerks in an alley. Steve inhales, and Buck stops, confused. His eyes are unreadable; they only give away his drunkenness. A moment later he retracts his hand, and his eyelids go wide.

“Steve,” he says, carefully. Again, Steve is frozen; again, he is enthralled. Again: “Steve,” but this time Buck sounds angry with himself.

“Bucky, what happened when you went home?” Steve asks, quietly. They are sitting opposite each other on the single bed, legs crossed and knees almost touching. Buck breathes in and brings his hands to his sides, as far from Steve as possible, then continues.

“Dad was all upset I hadn’t visited in years. Ma wanted to cook me and Becca dinner, but Dad said I should, since I hadn’t done anything else helpful to the family since I ‘walked out’.” Buck is imitating his father now, tall and proud and sure of himself. He’s always been like his father: confident, sure, but he’s also always been something more. Compassionate, maybe? Or maybe he’s always just felt more real to Steve. He’s not an image of a man with glasses low on his nose and a deep, steady voice. No- Buck laughs and gets drunk (too drunk, sometimes) and engages with the world. Mr. Barneses always seemed to harbor a dull disdain for any youthful spirit.

Bucky coughs, and Steve snaps out of his thoughts. He continues: “Becca started defending me, but Dad shut it down. I stayed there… two? three nights? And it was hell, Steve. It really was.” He leans closer to Steve, so close that their noses almost touch. “I can’t go back, ever. Never ever.”  
“That’s your home, Buck. You can’t leave it forever.”  
Laughing, Bucky leans back, away from Steve. He shakes his head, like he wants to say something but can’t. “No, Steve. It’s not my home: that’s what I realized.”

“You’re off your face drunk, Bucky. You just need sleep.” Steve says. He doesn’t know what Bucky is trying to tell him, doesn’t know how family can’t be home, because for Steve, his family, Ma and Bucky, will always be home. He doesn’t want to understand the words Bucky is trying to string together.

“I need…” Bucky is laughing again, hands on his ankles, rocking back and forth on the bed. “I need… God, what the hell,” he says, and now there are tears falling out of those round gray eyes. Steve knows worry, knows what it feels like to think you’ll lose someone and what it feels like to actually lose that person. The emotion crawling inside him, clawing at his heart and squeezing the raw, red muscle until it dissolves, is more than worry. He feels it when he looks at Bucky’s darkened eyes and quiet words and anxious face.

“Lie down,” Steve instructs. Bucky falls over horizontally, and the tears on his cheek fall down onto the sheets. “Now take off your shoes and sleep. Tomorrow, we’ll talk about getting drunk and going off without telling me.” Bucky kicks off his shoes, which Steve is surprised he made it home with, and curls back over on his side.

“Letters,” Bucky mumbles. Shaking his head, Steve pulls the bedspread over his friend. “I got to…” he trails off, sleep catching him easy in her hands.

The breeze is still blowing steadily through the window, but this time it’s accompanied by the rhythm of Buck’s breathing as he sleeps. Instead of smelling like Bucky’s smokes and cologne, the apartment reeks of alcohol, but that’s okay. That’s Bucky too, in his backwards way. Outside, Steve can hear people arguing in the streets and automobiles flashing by one after the other. He’s quiet, and the apartment is quiet. Steve returns to his sketchbook finally, after four days of radio silence, and takes a pencil in his hands. All that Bucky is saying, with his words, with his eyes, with his silences: Steve doesn’t understand it. He’s not sure he ever will be able to. But he understands one thing Bucky has said to him today, through the drunken stupor. It’s an idea he traces and explores in his sketchbook, slowly, with care and flaking charcoal: that this tiny apartment, this speck of the world and this person he shares it with, that this could be a place to always come back to, that this could count as an ending and a beginning, that this could mean everything all at once. That this could be home.

 

1937: _One of these days, you’re going to pick a fight you really can’t finish. You would’ve thought that by now you would’ve been tired of getting beat up in alleys by men who are twice your size, but you never do fail to disappoint. Steve, today I had to pull you out of a tin trash bin because some jerks stuffed you in there for having a sketchbook. The people in this world, I swear. But pulling you out to find you were bruised all over and swollen: that was painful. I swear I don’t show it, because it_ is _stupid, you understand. Refusing to back down from any fight ever, that’s stupid. But it hurts me to see you like this. When you’re fighting back, you’re a blazing fire, burning red and unstoppable. But when they beat you up so bad you can barely walk- yes, I remember that time, very vividly, Steve. And Steve, you’re the strongest person I’ve ever met, besides your Ma of course, but your body can’t take it._

_I could never say this to your face; you would never forgive me. But I don’t want your spine getting worse or your lungs to start to rattle even more or your legs to break clean off. I carried you home, today, because you were bleeding too much to see straight. I don’t want to have to carry you home one day because you can’t move at all. I don’t want to have to run to the hospital with you swung over my shoulder._

_I would carry you, gladly. I always would. But I don’t want you broken in my hands; I want you whole and fiery and healthy. Except here’s the issue: You gotta stop getting in fights. But who would Steve Rogers be if he didn’t get in stupid fights in every alley and parking lot in Brooklyn? That’s the Steve I’ve always known. It’s a backwards, stupid paradox. To keep you safe I gotta get you out of fights. But that’s who you are, and that’s what you do. You get in fights._

_Promise me you’ll never read this. Please._

_I don’t understand myself, and God, Steve, it seems like these days I’m always scared of something. It’s funny; I’m not sure I have something to be scared of, really. And days are good, stacking on each other like playing cards and then drifting away like used up smoke. I got work, and I got you. The heat in the apartment works sometimes. Becca’s in boarding school, and she writes me every month. But between all of this, flickering like a warning, is something else. I feel like I’m walking on a narrow line high above the city, and I can see all the way to Manhattan. The view is so pretty, but if I fell my body would be shattered against the ground and my insides would spill all over the sidewalk. It’s like a dream, replaying in my head every day that I see you and every day that I don’t._

_My father used to say that when we’re ready God tests us and tempers us like steel in the fire. I don’t believe in God like he does or you do, but I believe in something. Maybe this is the world, or God, or just you tempering me in the flames. Maybe this is my test, of what I can survive and what I can’t. But here’s the thing, the catch, the one bit I haven’t said: I like it. I’m burning and burning and burning and God help me, I like it._

 

1938

“Hey, watch out!” Steve barely manages to skirt around the coming bicycle as it cuts across the road. Stumbling off to the side, he reaches out and steadies himself on the brick wall of the building. Bucky shakes his head and offers his arm as a second means of balance, but Steve waves him off.

“Jerk,” he calls after the cyclist, but his words are lost in the wind and traffic.

“Come on, Rogers,” Bucky says, hooking his arm around Steve’s. With his free hand Bucky points ahead at the station. “We’re going to miss our train because you’re picking a fight with a biker.” Wrestling his arm from Bucky’s grip, Steve looks up at the sign, then the clock next to it and sighs.

“I hate to admit it, but you’re right.” 

“I’m right most of the time, if you’d listen.” Steve scoffs at that, then takes off running towards the subway station. “Okay, Rogers, if you want to run,” Buck calls after him. A few moments later, footsteps tell Steve that Bucky is running up behind him. He catches Steve just as they reach the arching entrance to the station.

“Tickets!” the woman behind the window calls, and the two boys stagger over to her. Giving them a disapproving look, she asks for their destination.

“Coney Island,” Steve tells her, and her eyebrows deepen in her pale face. Steve can almost imagine her thoughts: _two troublemaking boys, off to destroy the amusement parks._ Regardless, she hands over two tickets to them, the date and time neatly stamped in the upper corner.

“Aw, we got forty minutes?” Bucky complains, glaring over at the saleswoman. Her expression shifts to unimpressed.  
“Come on, Buck. Let’s just sit.”

Bucky looks over at him, incredulous. “I’m not waiting forty minutes for that train on some bench.”

“Okay well, let’s go over to the shops and heckle the authorities, huh?” Steve says, only half joking. He gestures to the collection of corner stores and empty restaurants next to the station. People are gathered around them like flies buzzing around a spill of honey, all hoping to catch some splinter of luck- maybe some soup, or bread, or a quarter.

“I’m game, Rogers,” Bucky returns, and so the two jog over to the stores. Most are abandoned, left a few years after the Depression set in and people realized it wasn’t going away. These stores are ghosts, with cracked windows and peeling paint and spiderwebs collecting in every crevice. Occasionally, those who want a little more than the tent camps will huddle up there until a lucky policeman finds them living beneath old soda counters. He and Buck skip over these until they find a cafe that’s still open.

A single server stands behind a dusty counter, holding a newspaper in his left hand. Several tables cluster around the room, but there are no customers in sight. No food, either. The prices listed on a board above the server’s head are amounts of money that neither of them, nor the large majority of America, can afford to pay. Still, the server’s eyes dart up at them when they enter. His eyelids narrow as he cases them as troublemakers, just like the woman at the station had. Brooklyn boys have that effect on people- maybe it’s the worn out clothes or the accent when they open their mouths. But Steve has grown used to folks, especially the ones who are rich, looking down on him like a piece of dirt beneath their feet.

“Look,” Bucky says, grabbing Steve’s arm and pointing over at a counter on the opposite side of the store where various items for sale are scattered about. Bucky tugs him over to the wall and picks up a tiny box with his left hand. His entire face has split into a grin. “Look, Steve,” he repeats, and twists a handle on the side.

A few notes drift out before the song starts going. It’s a slow song, one that boys and their dames sway to when the night is ending. If Steve could ever convince a girl to dance with him, maybe this song would be his special tune with her. Maybe at two in the morning they would start up the music box and hold each other in the half light of a small kitchen. It’s an empty piano piece, with a quiet voice crooning over it. Bucky is mesmerized, squeezing the music box between his palm and fingers.

“It’s meant for dancing, huh,” Steve says. Nodding, Bucky sets the box on the ledge and then begins to sway around like he is holding his girl in his arms, dancing with her. Steve can’t contain a gentle smile, maybe because of the look on Buck’s face: bliss, or something like it. Then Buck turns back to Steve and faces him, and the corners of his simple smile crease. His eyebrows lower, just slightly, but he keeps dancing on his own until the last few notes of piano putter away and the song ends.

Bucky doesn’t have a girl, not that Steve knows of. There was Rose, a girl he met when they went into the city to go dancing at Kennedy. Steve saw them once, with Bucky pressed up against her on the wall outside of the movies. She had been small and pretty, with neatly tied up blonde hair: a church girl. Her red lipstick used to stay on Buck’s face, at the corners of his mouth and sometimes smudged under his nose. But Bucky never brought her to the apartment, and after two months Steve didn’t see her again. And the other girls- Tatiana, Louise, Margaret… they were all gone after a night of dancing. Bucky would swing them around the dance floor, take them to the movies or some spectacle, kiss them sometimes, and then leave the bits of their broken hearts all over the Brooklyn streets.

Now, though, Bucky dances like he’s found his forever girl, and Steve watches him. His feelings are on the verge of something, but Steve can’t comprehend it, can’t even begin to identify what’s welling inside him. Instead, he just waits until the spell breaks and Bucky stops.

“Kid, you going to buy that, or are you just trying to knick something off me?” The shopkeeper, probably in his mid-40s, is looking over at them with bored apathy, but he can’t hide the added concern that these two boys may be trying to rob his store.

“I’m twenty-one years old. I can vote, I can drink, I can fight in the army, and I can damn well buy this without you thinking I’m gonna steal your things,” Bucky says, indignant. Twenty-one has treated Bucky well; he’s decided rules are more like suggestions now that he’s an adult. It’s an attitude Steve has assumed ever since his first skirmish in the schoolyard, but Bucky had scorned it until he realized adults still want to see a twenty-one year-old as a child.

“How much?” Steve adds in. The man shifts his glare to Steve.

“Don’t tell me you’re twenty-one too, ya little shrimp.”

Buck lets out an incredulous laugh. Steve just squints back over at him.

“I’m twenty,” he enunciates. “Old enough to know you’re one of those fools who thought they could survive the Depression with their business intact, but look where that got you.” Steve says, gesturing around the abandoned store. “Now you pretend to be superior to the people out there waiting at soup kitchens, to kids from different boroughs, to anyone you can try and prove your strength to, just ‘cause you got a roof over your head. But when it comes down to it, you’re just as hungry, just as poor, just as pathetic and hopeless as the rest of us. So tell me, how much for that music box?”

The man just stares. Bucky has a smile split over his features, and he turns the music box over in his hands. Slowly, the man looks down at his newspaper as if it holds the answers to what Steve has just said. Then, he looks back up.

“Half a buck.”  
It’s too high for the old music box and its tinny song. But Bucky does it, pays the money he shouldn’t even have, and doesn’t make any smart remarks while doing it. It’s nothing short of a miracle.

“Thank you, sir,” Steve calls back as the two go to leave the store. The man squints after them, then speaks.

“You said you could fight in the army now,” he begins, directed towards Bucky. The man opens his newspaper and takes off his glasses. Pointing with one end of the glasses to an article, he glances up at Bucky. “Germany’s invading Czechoslovakia, and no one’s happy. Roosevelt might get you your war yet, huh? And you’ll be out there dying for this country.” He props his elbow on the counter, leaning closer to them even though they’re nearly out the door. “I fought in France back in ’17. Thought I was some big shot, too, with my uniform and gun. But I’ll tell you this,” he says, then turns to Steve. “You too. War is hell. You go in a gangly kid with jokes and friends and laughs. But it spits you out a soldier, then tells you to live your life.”

Buck is breathing fast next to him, his chest rising and falling visibly. But Steve’s eyes are locked on the man’s because even more than Bucky does, he _knows._ The war took his father before Steve was even born. He _knows_ that war is hell, because he saw it in Sarah Rogers’s tired face and rosary. Does this give him kinship with the man behind the counter? He doesn’t know, but he no longer feels the rush of anger at him he felt minutes ago. Steve realizes, then, that his feet have carried him to the counter, away from Bucky and the door.

“Can I see?” he asks quietly, and the man hands him the newspaper. Sure enough, an article stands out at him describing Germany’s ensuing invasion of Czechoslovakia and its leader, a man called Adolf Hitler. There’s no mention of a war or of America sending off troops, but all the same Steve knows what the article means: war is knocking on America’s door.

“Come on, Steve,” Bucky says, already heading out the door. Reluctantly, Steve surrenders the paper and walks back towards the exit, his hands clenched into fists. Buck throws an arm around him as they exit the store and head back to the station. “You ready for Luna Park?”

“Always,” he mumbles. The accumulation of all of this walking has begun to settle over Steve, and he leans his head back and swallows down the pain and keeps his weight on Bucky.

“Okay, so I’m thinking we eat as many hot dogs as we can, and then we ride the Cyclone, and then the Chutes and Helter Skelter…”

1938: _Tell me what it feels like to fall in love. Tell me, because I don’t know. I’ve gone dancing with so many girls, kissed them all against the wall outside, held their hands, got their bright red lipstick stains on my coat. And they’re pretty, they are. Pretty and sweet and whip smart, most of them. But in the end I always have to leave, because I don’t know how to be what they want me to be. I don’t know how to go steady or stay in one place. It’s like they want me to be a star in the sky, fixed against the night. But they don’t know the stars never stay; the stars drift away until you can’t see them anymore. Even when the sky is the same, they’ve moved._

_Tell me what it feels like to desire. Tell me what it feels like to want to reach out and touch, just once. Tell me what it feels like to want someone’s body against your own and your lips on theirs. Tell me who I should want on my skin. Who I should want to see the whole of._

_Christ, I shouldn’t be writing this. But I have to, I think, or it’ll all pour out of me when I’m drunk or dreaming or alone. It makes me scared, what I feel, so I write it here so no one else will know. So no one else will be scared of me, not you, not Becca, not the whole world._

_Do you know I can hear you breathing at night? I can hear your lungs working just to keep you alive and the quiet wheeze underneath your hard-earned breaths. It does something for me, I think. Makes me feel like I have something to steady myself. To keep myself fixed, right there, for you. If I could just take the sound of your breathing and funnel and focus it into something I could hold onto, like Sarah’s rosary or picture or something, then I could finally feel certain and safe. It’s you, too. Your blinking blue eyes and twitching fingers and fiery voice. Your stupid skinny bones and shriveled lungs and fight that doesn’t fit inside you. Damnit. Damnit damnit damnit, it’s you. It always has been._

_Tell me what it’s like to fall in love. Tell me what it’s like to do it right, and easy. To spin the girl on the dance floor and know that you want her in your arms, to want her next to you every morning and night, to take her home and build castles and worlds with her. Tell me, please because I don’t fucking know anymore and I’m scared and I don’t understand._

_Please tell me, Steve._

 

1939

Time crawls and stumbles and shoulders itself up. Steve learns life without his mother, and it is a hellish thing. But he survives it.

Three years after she died, Steve and Bucky have grown around each other like intertwining vines in their small apartment. It’s definitely their apartment now, no longer Bucky’s place where Steve is staying for a while. They’ve got one bed and a tiny heater and stacks of sketchbooks. Bucky’s music box sits on the window sill, and they crawl past it every night to reach the fire escape. Steve found an old bookcase once, or the remnants of it, so he and Bucky fixed it up and pushed it into the corner. Buck leaves his tiny gray copy of _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ there, next to a torn up book they think is for children- _The Hunting of the Snark._ The woman living upstairs gave it to them, but neither Bucky nor Steve can make sense of the nonsense in its pages. Smoke permeates the choked up air in the rest of the room, from Buck’s cigarettes and the cars piling up outside. Sometimes, when Bucky gets a lucky break at work, he brings home a slice of peach cake cupped in his hands. It’s rare, but when he does they huddle around the heater and cut the cake into small pieces, then shovel the bits slowly into their begging mouths. Steve always chokes on the sweetness, but he swallows it down.

Today, though, like most days, they’re lucky to have some stewed corn and bread. Bucky stands at the stove, stirring the corn and boiling some cabbage along with it. He glances over at Steve, who is leaning against the edge of the fire escape, trying to stifle a cough.

“Don’t catch your death out there!” Bucky calls out. Nodding carelessly, Steve locks and unlocks his elbows against the metal railing.

“I don’t know, Buck. That stewed corn might be the death of me if this fresh air isn’t.” Bucky laughs. It’s September 1939, and Brooklyn looks like a ghost town. Steve can’t see the usual children in the streets or homeless folks leaning, helpless, against the stoops. Even the clotheslines, which should be full of dirt-stained laundry, sway empty in the sepia air. A single woman is wandering below their window, hands in her pockets as her long skirt swishes back and forth in the wind.

“Hey, you mind reading that?” Bucky asks. He’s using both hands to stir the corn and cabbage, but he nods to the unread newspaper sitting on the table. Steve jumps down from the fire escape and ducks back in the window, breathing hard. He picks up with the paper with his right hand and opens it with his left.

“Same old news,” Steve says, thumbing through the pages. “Dodgers are doing alright; FDR is sick; Germany is causing trouble in Europe, and something about a fair coming up?”

“FDR’s sick, huh?” says Bucky, “What’s he got, polio?” Steve nods. He can feel the two of them treading towards a dangerous topic now, moving with careful ease as they always do when the question of health comes up. He’s known Bucky for twelve years now, so almost any topic is simple for them to dissect: family, their endless money problems, hell, even the girls they fancy. But Steve has always kept a careful cover over the details of his illness; like with his mother did, he knows Bucky has bigger and brighter concerns than one skinny guy whose lungs won’t hold up.  
“The poor man, trying to run a country and he can barely walk,” Steve says, and Buck scoffs.

“Maybe if he were running the country a little better I wouldn’t see guys out there eating shoe polish ‘cause they got nothing left for food.” Steve considers this, flickering his eyelashes down. Their president is trying, he knows, but he also knows the suffering he sees in the streets every damn day. He knows there are kids here in Brooklyn growing up without food or a bed to sleep in. He knows his own suffering better than anyone’s: no money for a doctor, not strong enough for a job except painting a few walls down in the city, can’t afford more school after he dropped out of Auburndale in ’38. Finally, he looks back up at Bucky.

“Maybe he could be doing better, but I still feel sorry for him.”

“He’s sick, huh,” Bucky starts. Anticipation and worry creeps up inside of Steve. “And you are, too. What is it you’ve got, Rogers?”

“A bad case of a nosy Barnes,” Steve says, but the joke lacks effort. Bucky just stares over at him, disappointed, while stirring the vegetables with one hand. Steam rises off them, and Steve can imagine the inner workings of the ancient stovetop trying to hold themselves together without collapsing in a pile of smoke. “Alright, you already know what I have: the doctor’s whole book.”  
Bucky lists: “Asthma, spinal problems, stunted muscular formation, heart murmur, scarlet fever when you were a kid, high blood pressure—”

“Enough,” Steve cuts in, quietly. The apartment goes silent except for the swishing of the corn and cabbage. “I know I got those things. It doesn’t matter, though. FDR’s got polio, and he’s up there making radio programs and deals and trying to pull America out of the dirt. I got no right to do any less than him.”

Bucky shakes his head. “Amazing. You woulda thought the asthma would have stopped your lungs, but it didn’t. You woulda thought the spinal problems would have stopped your walking, but they didn’t. And you woulda thought that your common sense would have saved you from thinking you got to be like our goddamn president to prove yourself, but look at that- it didn’t!”

“You’re burning the stew,” Steve points out.

After Bucky manages to pour the salvageable cabbage and corn into two drinking cups (they can’t afford bowls), he hands Steve a chunk of bread, and the two climb out back onto the fire escape. Night is already a blanket over the Brooklyn apartments, and the woman Steve saw before is long gone. Instead, it’s just the two of them, backs against the window and shoulders crowded against each other, sitting outside to enjoy the stars. Of course, there are only a few left to notice, the rest blocked out by the smoke and smog from the city. Still, Steve remembers some of the constellations his Ma taught him back when he was little, on the porch of their tiny house. She always said the stars were different back home, in Ireland, and Steve always had to ask her if that made Ireland his home. She would shake her head and leave the question unanswered, then go back to showing him the pinpoints of light against the dark sky. If Steve squints now, he can make out the extremes of Hercules, and off to the side, the faint outline of Pisces.

“Hey, Buck: do you ever think the stars’ll disappear completely?”

“‘Course not. Don’t be an idiot.”

“But look up, Buck. There’s hardly any left.”

“Listen, and stop thinking so much” Bucky instructs, and turns the dial on the radio they’ve haphazardly shoved on the space left on the fire escape. The bulky radio has taken up nearly all of the space, leaving Steve and Bucky’s legs piled on top of each other as they try to find space against the wall.

The radio crackles to life, and Buck spins the black dial to tune in to their usual channel. It’s a boring stream of entertainment pieces, and its familiar babble quickly fades into the background. Content, Bucky leans back and dips his chunk of bread into the stew, takes a bite and grimaces, but swallows it down. Steve holds back a laugh.

“I’ve had worse,” Bucky says. Nodding, Steve dips his own bread and begins to eat. They’ve both had worse, when there was no money or food at all.

“When’s it going to end, Buck?”

“What, your stupid streak?”  
Steve shoves as roughly as the tiny space will allow. “No, you jerk. I mean the Depression.”

“Never?” Bucky says. “Maybe America will just fade off the map of the world because there’s no one left to remember it exists.” He leans closer to Steve, so their faces almost touch. “Maybe we’ll be the new rich ones, ‘cause we got a roof to stay under and some food. Maybe I’ll get fired because no one wants ships anymore or anything. We’ll all just be stuck here.”

“Maybe,” Steve says, turning away from Bucky to look up at the stars. “But what if it does end- what do we do then?”

“Easy. You go back to art school, and I work on the docks until we’ve got enough money to get out.”  
“Get out of Brooklyn?”

Buck nods and puts his arm around Steve’s shoulder. Steve’s still looking at the sky, but he can feel Bucky’s gray eyes looking over at him. “I love the city, but we got to get away. We got to go somewhere nice, maybe New Hampshire or _Vermont;_ God, Steve, we could buy a cabin somewhere and never have to eat corn and cabbage again, ‘cause we could buy all the fresh food we wanted: peach cake everyday, Steve, and oranges and _butter._ ” Exhaling, Bucky finally turns his eyes to the fading stars, just like Steve wanted him to. And the thing is, Steve can see it all laid out in front of him, so clearly. He can taste those oranges, fresh picked from an grove in their backyard, wet and dripping and cold. The sky in Vermont is bluer than the Hudson (though, almost anything is), with the real stars framed in picture quality, just like the movies at those science museums: Ursa Major and Orion clearly etched out above their heads. And Bucky is there too: of course he is. They’ve got a room, too, with a radio just like this one and sheets that don’t itch every night. It’s so real, all of it. It’s so close.

Finally, Steve turns back towards Buck and meets his excited eyes.

“We got to,” Steve says quietly. “And you wouldn’t have to work, and we could go dancing and watch the stars at night, all the stars, because the city sky wouldn’t be blocking half of them.”

“And,” Buck continues, his voice hushed, his face pink with anticipation, “And, we’d pay a doctor to fix your lungs and your back so you wouldn’t have to… so you wouldn’t have to pretend anymore, that you’re okay.”

Steve looks away.

“We’d buy you every colored pencil you wanted, and paints, in every damn color that exists, and you’d paint the walls of our cabin with the Brooklyn sunrise.”

“Buck,” Steve says, roughly. He’s imagining it, can’t stop thinking of the place they’d get, of the oily scent of paints and the sickly sweet drift of peach cake. And Bucky, framed against the stars, a cigarette in his mouth and smoke wandering into the air. Bucky fits in this country dream like the last piece of his puzzle, so casual and relaxed and happy and full and whole. He’s not gray anymore, but bright and bursting in greens and blues and reds against silver mountains. Steve could paint him into the sky right then, could see it like a tiny picture in his mind, so vivid and real, just like Vincent Van Gogh’s self portrait hanging in the Met, just like the the blue irises in Sarah Rogers’s eyes or the pink stain of a girl’s lips under the flush lights on the dance floor. He turns again, to face Bucky. Their shoulders bump, and Bucky’s arm around Steve tightens. Their legs are touching too, one pressed against the other and perfectly aligned. “Buck.”

Bucky inhales, and his eyes flit up to meet Steve’s. Everything is rushing, rushing, rushing into this moment. He can’t feel anything, really; he can only see the Brooklyn stars and Buck’s gray eyes on his.

“Steve—“

“— _Germany has crossed the border into Poland, and this is an act of war, America. Germany has invaded another nation, and I don’t see how the rest of Europe can go on appeasing her actions any longer. It is possible we may soon be seeing a war fought by our boys here in America as well.”_

“What?” Steve snaps his neck towards the sound, as if the radio can give him the answers he needs. “A war?”

Bucky swallows and flickers his gaze out over the fire escape. He doesn’t say anything, just goes back to swallowing down the stew. Steve, though, is captivated. The staticky voices in the radio continue on about Germany until there’s nothing left to say, and the station switches back to empty entertainment transmissions. But Steve can’t stop replaying the words in his head. _A war fought by our boys._ Finally, he turns the knob on the radio around and around until the stream of sound fades into silence.

“We gotta fight,” Steve says, suddenly. He grabs Bucky by the shoulders and gives him a little shake. “We gotta enlist, Bucky.”  
Bucky swings his head down and away from Steve, tightening his grip on the silver cup. “What?” His voice sounds shaky.

“Listen, Buck. You said it yourself, we got to get out of here. And that’s our duty to the country anyway. We have to fight.”

“We don’t have to do anything, Steve,” Bucky returns, still facing away from him. Steve drops his hands from Bucky’s shoulders and grips onto the side of the railing and the windowsill.

“No, this is it,” Steve is smiling now, but it’s no longer a quiet smile. It’s dangerous, in the dark Brooklyn air. “This is it, Bucky. My father died in the war, and I have to go back out there and win this war for him.”

“There’s not even a war yet!” Bucky twists his whole body to face Steve. “America’s not involved; why are you so eager to go die out there?”

“I’m not!” Now, Steve is fiery. “I don’t want to die. I want to fight for what’s right.”  
“Oh, give me a break—“  
“No, you listen, Buck. I know you’ve been working hard at the docks while I’ve just been sitting here messing around with some pencils and paints if I’m lucky. This is our chance to go fight, to do something right for the world and for our country.”  
“When has our country ever done right by us?” Bucky bends his knees and stands up, then gestures widely around the empty block. “When have we not been poor and starving, because our country couldn’t hold it together?”

Steve rises to join him, but keeps his eyes on Bucky. “What about the soup kitchens? What about my mother?"  
“Your mother? She came to America a dreamy-eyed immigrant because she thought she would find freedom, and all this country gave her was an unmarked grave for her and her husband.”

“Shut the hell up about my mother.” Steve’s eyes are dark, his pale face glittering in the moonlight.

“I’m—“ Bucky stops, unable to meet Steve’s eyes.

Silence envelopes their fire escape, ringing through the cool Brooklyn air. Even the breeze is gone, blown away and lost. Steve scuffs his shoe against the metal grated platform, swallows, and leans his head back against the window. Bucky closes his eyes.

Steve wants this, more than anything. The radio stuck an idea in his head that will keep rattling around until he lets it out. He thinks of Joseph Rogers bleeding out in a cold trench in France. He thinks of his mother holding his rosary to her lips with her eyes closed, mouthing a silent prayer. He sees himself coughing up blood alone in the apartment, the red of the liquid staining the paper in his sketchbooks. He sees Bucky standing in the road, without food or a place to stay or heat to warm his bones. He sees, finally, something he can fix.

If he joins the army, Steve can earn money to send home to Bucky. He can find a doctor in the army who might help his lungs. He can do something with his life instead of wasting away feeling sorry for himself.

He can, he realizes, feeling overwhelmed, do what his mother wanted: become something. To fulfill why she came here.

“Bucky,” he says, quietly. “I need to do this. Please.”

Bucky meets his eyes. His shadow is big and sharp against the brick wall, but his face is tender and worried. “Steve—“

“Please.”

Steve doesn’t often beg. Not when his mother first swelled inside with tuberculosis, not when the landlord told him he would no longer allow him to rent out Sarah Roger’s old home, not when he and Bucky had no food and couldn’t go to his parents for help.

But now? Now, he has a goal. A plan to accomplish something in this world, like his mother wanted, and provide something for Bucky, who has given him everything. All he has to do is enlist.

“All I got to do is give ‘em my name and home address. Maybe they won’t even put me in.”

He doesn’t need Bucky’s permission; he would do it anyway, climb out the window or sneak away while Buck’s at work and run, even if it cost him the air in his lungs, just to get to the enlistment office. He already knows this.

But he wants Bucky to want this for him, too.

“Alright,” Bucky says, slowly. “But before you enlist, you need to at least learn how to fight. We got to get you strong” He gives Steve a friendly punch on the arm. “I’ll take you to boxing lessons at Goldie’s, then we’ll see where you are.”  
It’s not a yes, and Steve keeps that secondary plan in the back of his head, but it’s close enough.

“Thanks, Buck,” Steve says. His voice is caught in a rasp, which soon follows with a gasping cough. Bucky glances over, but Steve knits his eyebrows together and shakes his head. “Not a word, Barnes.” Bucky smiles, sadly.

Climbing back through the window, they return their glasses to the kitchen. Bucky’s never had a clock, so Steve has to guess the time by the level of darkness coming in through the window. Eleven, maybe? Midnight? He’s not tired, but Buck is from his long day of heavy labor at the docks.

“Come on and sleep,” Bucky entreats him, but Steve shakes his head. Bucky shrugs and throws himself in bed.

The dim colors of Steve’s colored pencils are barely visible in the low light, but he can distinguish the green, red, and black. Only three colors, but Buck’s always said that Steve can create masterpieces without needing the whole rainbow. Brushing a couple shavings off of the last page he was working on, Steve gazes down at his drawing. The waxy texture of the colored pencils stands out to him; he needs paints, and intricate brushes, but they’re mind-numbingly expensive at best and impossible to track down at worst. His last drawing is of Lady Liberty, in bold green with black shading because he’s got nothing else to work with. The statue floats angelically on the river, holding her torch high and clutching her book. He drew the picture from memory, having no way to see her from the fire escape or any other window. She looks angelic; no, she looks like Sarah Rogers on a good day, with blonde hair pulled behind her ears and mouth drawn in an all-knowing smile. Flipping past it, he opens to a blank page. The white is clean and crisp, with little flecks of the paper peeling off.

He inhales, picks up the black pencil, and begins to sketch. Lines to the left, shading, a full outline, skinny and short, darkened features, and suddenly there’s a figure on the page.

It takes Steve all of two seconds to realize he’s drawn himself. Well, it’s him but not really. This version of Steve stands relaxed but prepared, his hands at his sides. He’s gazing off at something, but his eyes are focused. He looks like he could jump off the page at any moment. There’s no sign of his crooked back, and the muscles in his legs are defined enough for him to appear athletic, and maybe even strong.

Steve stares for several seconds, then switches the pencil in his hand for the green one and attacks the picture with it. Shading and shadows, all in varying versions of the one green pencil. He’s wearing a dull green- mixed with black- uniform, and the shadows at his feet are darker, but still the same color. Steve closes his eyes, because he knows what he’s drawing, without even trying to. He takes back the black pencil and presses it hard against the paper, outlining a shape in his hand. It’s not the right color or make, but it’s recognizable. One end rests on his shoulder, and he carefully holds the barrel in his hand.

Steve opens his eyes. He has drawn a soldier.

It is him, but it is a version of himself he doesn’t know how to be, not yet. Bucky always said he couldn’t follow orders for the life of him, and he knows soldiers have to do what they’re told. And the gun in his hand… Steve doesn’t know how he’ll be able to pick up that weapon, place it on his shoulder, and squeeze the trigger.

The soldier picture of Steve is wearing a green uniform, just like Lady Liberty in her rusted copper. It’s a sick parallel, one holding a light to guide and the other holding a weapon of war. Steve closes his sketchbook and swallows. There isn’t any room for doubt, not on a battlefield. If he gets this right, he’ll be saving people’s lives, and the gun will only put bullets in the ones who hurt people. The bad ones, no matter what country name is stamped on their shoulder.

Sure of himself again, Steve slides the book to the other end of the table and turns back towards where Bucky is quietly snoring. _He’ll understand_ , Steve thinks. _He already almost does._

The black colored pencil falls from his fingers onto the table, the same color as the gun he drew, as the dark Brooklyn sky outside, as Bucky’s cropped hair, as the ink that will be scratched onto his enlistment form when he gets accepted: 1A, straight off to Basic tomorrow.

Steve falls asleep that night more sure of this than he has been of anything in a long while.

 

1939: _You always had pretty hands- artist’s hands. I liked that. I liked the way they fit in mine when we sit out on the fire escape. It never means much to you, I can tell, but it means a hell of a lot to me. When we sit out there, legs tangling together and dangling over the edge, the whole night shining in front of us, all I want to do every time is to lean over and touch that pretty face. Right on the cheekbone, where you got a stubborn scar that won’t go away, or maybe on the spot where your nose bends down. I hope no one reads this, not now, not ever, because they’d burn it firstly then come after me next. But I wanted to; I still want to._

_These past few years: ’37, and ’38, I wouldn’t trade them for the world. I didn’t know I loved you, see, until you were here everyday, with your pinched up angry face and your noble words and your sketchbooks. I didn’t know until that first night, when you asked where you should sleep, and there was only one bed. I guess I was innocent then- I guess we both were. We sprawled together, on that tiny little bed. And that’s when I knew, I think. You were too close for me not to know.I keep it all inside, bottled up like some fizzy drink we can’t afford, even when we’re sleeping in the same bed, stumbling over each other drunk, tangled up to keep out the cold and holding hands because it feels right._

_Whenever I consider the heart of the matter, the problem’s always me. Me and my stupid mind that is hellbent on making my life the punchline of some sick divine joke. Because we keep running to each other: in grade school, when your Ma died, wherever the storm pushes us together. But every time, I miss you, and you slip by like hours of daylight in a Manhattan winter spell. Every time, you miss me, because you can’t see what’s right in front of your damn crooked nose. But why would you notice it? Why would you notice something you don’t even know to look for? You wouldn’t, really. You haven’t._

_The worst thing now is the war. There’s not even a war yet, and you’re already set on going. It’s the worst thing for you, and I know you won’t get it out of your head until you’re in it, because that’s what you do. Persevere until the problem’s gone, and then some. Or until you’re alone in some alley with split knuckles and a broken face. I ain’t gonna let this war take you, sure as the sun in the sky and the mud in the Hudson. I won’t, or Sarah Rogers’ll have my head from whatever Catholic heaven she’s sitting in. If I know one thing, I know that._

 

1939

Steve would be winning this fight if there wasn’t so much blood on his eyelids.

He thinks the boy cut him with his nails, or else he’s got hellishly sharp knucklebones, because the cuts on Steve’s forehead are bleeding like crazy. And he can’t see.

“Listen up, scrawny little kid—“  
Steve interrupts him with a well-placed punch, just like Buck showed him at Goldie’s- swing back and then move forward with the full force of the body, but contain it to the arm, don’t put the thumb inside the fist, and connect. The taller boy, sweat crowding his brow, catches the punch and throws Steve off to the side. They’re in the parking lot of the grocer, and the few people who are tread by with arms of food ignore the scene. Flat against the concrete, Steve inhales, waits long enough to catch his breath, then bends his elbows and pushes back off the ground.

“You can’t keep me down, you big ugly—“

The kid throws another punch, straight in the face, and Steve lands on his side. His spine screams, and for a moment his vision goes spotty. Squeezing his eyes shut, he focuses all of the pain into the small of his back. _Contain it._ The voice, once his mother, has been replaced by Bucky’s calm voice as he directs Steve to breathe and funnel down his pain.

 _Contain it._ Steve stands back up, the impact of the ground still stinging everywhere. He’s battered, but he still clambers back to his feet to face the boy.

“You look like a demon sent from hell, so bloody like that, and you keep getting up. Guess you really want what’s coming, huh?” The kid is twice his size and probably a couple years older. He had been stealing a chunk of bread from an old lady’s shopping bag when Steve caught him. The poor woman didn’t even notice his sneaky hands reaching into her cloth bag from the grocer. Steve knows the woman must have some money, because she can afford the grocer, and he knows the kid was probably stealing because he had no food for himself. But still, he knows when something is wrong. He knows that stealing from anyone is never the answer. It’s the principle of the matter, Steve hears himself saying. It sounds like something he would say to Bucky, to justify what he’d done.

“You’re the only one who’s got something coming, and that’s for taking what ain’t yours,” Steve spits back. He reaches a hand up to wipe the blood from his face and push back his hair from his eyes. His inhale catches as he lowers his hand, and Steve hears the unmistakeable wheeze, the wheeze that has been catching him unaware for weeks now, that’s worsened to the point where he had to give up lessons at Goldie’s, that’s always followed by painful coughing fits.

“Shut up,” the boy snarls, and goes in to strike Steve again. But Steve ducks, somehow, and dives out of the way. He won’t back down from this fight; he just needs a second to catch his breath. It feels like someone has taken his breathing, taken his air, and snatched it away from his chest. Desperate, his lungs work double time, scratching and gasping. “You still want to stand up?” calls out the boy.

“Always,” Steve says back. He digs a grip into the ground, letting his coughs relax into tortured breathing, and stands up. He always has; he always will. When he was younger, Sarah Rogers taught him this. When the Depression ended her job, when they couldn’t afford heat and had to sleep with chattering teeth and blue skin, when even the chop of potatoes in the kitchen stopped because they couldn’t pay for any food at all, Sarah stood up.

“Your choice, idiot.” He swings back, and Steve, tired, doesn’t even attempt to dodge it. This blow connects with his nose: already broken once, and fragile as it is. Red-hot burning pain blooms in his nose, traveling down each one of his nerves with frightening, instantaneous speed, until his entire face lights up with the sensation. The blood on his eyelids is no longer a concern, nor are the bruises on his torso or the cuts on his arms. Not even the crook in his spine and the hitch in his lungs take priority. Steve’s nose feels like it’s been stuck with a red hot poker and cracked in half. It takes all of his willpower not to scream.

“And?” the stupid kid asks. Steve can’t respond, because his mouth won’t function and his arms and legs won’t react. Laughing, he scuffs his feet against the parking lot and strides away. Groaning, or trying to, Steve rolls onto his back. He has to stand up; he needs to. The boy got away with the bread, and he has barely a scratch to pay for it. _Come on,_ he tells himself. The pain in his nose responds, says _stay down_ , _or you’ll get broken permanently._

He keeps fighting this battle against the pain resonating in his body, until it becomes apparent to him that he cannot breathe.

_Damn it, should have worried about the lungs after all._

Steve savors two more seconds of consciousness before his bloody eyelashes fall over weary eyes, and he lands against the ground, cold and broken.

 

“—passed out in the middle of a parking lot, just assuming someone would come find you.” Steve jerks awake, only to find he’s horizontal, being carried against someone’s chest, with his legs swinging out. “Would you look at that, the kid decided to rejoin the living.”

“Bucky?” Steve mumbles.

“Nope, I’m the other guy who pulls you out of alleys and parking lots after you get the hell beaten out of you.”

“Bucky,” he affirms. Buck’s hands are solid around him, anchoring him to reality. And, as soon as he wakes up, reality hits him hard. “My nose…” he groans, dropping his neck back. The familiar pain of a broken bone is grinding down on him, and he thinks he can feel the schism in his structure where the cartilage has split apart.

“Broken.”

“Anything else?”

Bucky laughs, incredulous. “Anything else? Your nose is broken, kid. Worry about that, and we’ll worry about the rest of you later, huh?”

Steve makes a noise somewhere between assent and a grunt of pain. Above him, the Brooklyn blue-stained sky spins, and the clouds twist and shift. He remembers the first time Bucky set his nose right; it hurt like hell. They were pressed down on the cold apartment floor in the middle of February, and it was still cold outside. Steve thought the cold must be creeping inside of his bones, into the split in his nose, because it was slipping and expanding inside of him, and Bucky kept telling him to shut up and breathe while he cupped his hands over Steve’s nose and _twisted—_

“Alright, Rogers, you’re walking.” Bucky sets him down on the cruel, unforgiving New York sidewalk.

“What?” he yelps. “I’ve got a broken nose!”

“And unless you’ve also got broken legs, you’re walking,” Bucky answers. “After you,” he says, gesturing to the path ahead. Steve groans, but he lets his legs carry him forward.

Later, when Bucky pushes his nose back into its proper shape (or something like it), and after the blinding wave of pain has settled to a black, dull ache, after Bucky finishes the endless scolding for trying to take on a guy twice his size, after his cuts on his forehead and his arms and his stomach are bandaged the best Bucky can do, Steve still doesn’t regret it.

They sit together on the gray bed, the too-tall dark-haired boy and the bandaged up broken blond. Steve wonders, quietly, in his mind, if the kid is back at the grocer now, taking soup cans.

“Fighting random kids in alleys isn’t like the war, Steve,” Bucky says, quietly.

“I know—“

“The war is much, much worse.”

Bucky is right. But Steve can reconcile these two things in his mind: the bullet-riddled worn out war with the nameless kid in the parking lot. Because in both instances, he sees himself fighting for those who can’t fight for themselves, the old woman and the people Germany is oppressing, the weak and the helpless.

He’ll fight in that war, no matter what. It’s not important that the enlistment officers flat-out refused him when they saw him the first time. When he begged for them to let him in, they reviewed his forms, saw the asthma, and sent him out the door immediately. “Go home,” they had said, “and be glad you’re not eligible. “

But Steve knows better than to let one punch keep him down; he stands up. Even if Goldie’s won’t let him learn to fight, even if Bucky is still reluctant, even if his asthma tries to cripple him, he’ll keep standing up, until he sees the enlistment form with _Steven Grant Rogers_ written in the top left corner and _1A_ written in the bottom right. 

 

1940: _You really want to fight in this goddamn war, huh? Sarah Rogers used to tell me what your father told her about the war. Yeah, he was proud, fighting for his country and all. But what was he fighting for, really? Everyone who remembers the Great War remembers nothing but death, but for what? Sarah said Joseph, or Joe, like she used to call him, fondly, didn’t move more than a couple feet in all his time in the trenches. So yeah, he was ducking his head and shooting his gun and huddling up with the other soldiers. But he didn’t save anyone, not in Europe and definitely not in America. This is horrible, what I’m thinking, what I’m writing. Maybe_ selfish _is a better word. But your father fought and died in a war that did nothing but lead to more death. I’m sorry._

_Point is, you don’t belong in a trench in France, not will hell raining down above your head. You don’t belong in a plane or a tank. It’s a paintbrush that belongs in your hand, not a gun, or a bomb, or anything else. Tell you a secret: when the enlistment guys refused you, and your face went all sad like a kicked puppy, when we walked out of there with the 4F plain to see written on that piece of paper, I was ecstatic. I know it’s horrible. But I can’t do it, Steve. I can’t see you out there with an army uniform on, your hair cut short and your pale face bloody and shocked. God knows you’re not innocent, Steve; you’ve been through too much. But war, what I know of it, at least, is not a game of right and wrong. It’s not righteous, like you think, to stand out there and kill people. And if you don’t believe that, if you don’t believe me being awful, shooting down your dream, then believe that Sarah wouldn’t have wanted this. I don’t think Joe would’ve, either, if I had known him._

_Sometimes I wonder if I could freeze time. Or, not freeze it, exactly, but keep us all here in this situation, the clock spinning round and round but nothing changing. I know I’m being selfish again, because some people still can’t afford food or a house or anything at all. But as much as I’d like to find some paradise in Vermont or something with you, I’ll take what we have now over you in that war any day. And I can’t even bring myself to consider what else might happen out there: I don’t want to think about you with a bullet in your guts and your blue eyes up and open and empty. No, I want to keep us right here on this Brooklyn block, in this one-room apartment, standing out on the fire escape, so your eyes can look up at the stars from here, not from a smoking battlefield in Italy._

_I’m so selfish, Steve. God, I want to stay here and breathe this air and see you everyday and watch your hands trace drawings in your sketchbook. I want to have smokes and sit on the windowsill. I want to share it all with you. That’s my dream, really. It’s not even the fresh air or cabin or food or money or anything. It’s just you, alive and happy._

 

1940

The winter of ’40 hurts like hell.

Steve won’t lie; he feels it heavy in his lungs every day. He thinks maybe he is dying, like his mother had, all the fat on his body wasting away as the air leaves him, slowly, until it’s all gone. When walking hurts, when sitting hurts, when breathing hurts, Steve thinks of his mother, and how much she fought, and if she could have fought more. He wondered how much he can fight until he drowns in his own sick.

He thinks, now, that this is the time when Bucky first started to really be afraid for him. His chronic asthma from before pales in comparison to the screaming fits of coughing that takes hold that winter.

The first few weeks are hard, but not impossible. He coughs onto the frozen Brooklyn ground, and Bucky holds his shoulder. He tries to keep to one side of the bed, so the sick won’t spread over into Bucky, but an incredulous look is all it takes for that fantasy to end. He stays home, with his sketchbook and aching lungs, while Bucky works.

After a week of feeling better: so much better, Buck decides Steve should come out with him to his work at the docks.

“You just need some fresh air,” Buck insists, before lacing Steve’s fingers in his own and dragging him out of the apartment.

The air at the docks is fresh, and salty. Steve can even taste the metal of the looming boats and maybe even the newly laundered thick scent of the boys’ uniforms. Bucky’s muscles stretch and pull as he hauls boxes and parts. So many weapons, Steve sees. The noonday sun scorches down, even as the Manhattan winter freezes them to their bones.

Finally, Bucky looks up from his straining work, and the two begin to walk through Manhattan, block after block, to reach their home. It’s a long walk, and Steve is conscious with every step of the rhythm of his lungs. He tells himself he is strong, that he can make it. Maybe he’s lying, but Steve reaches home without Bucky’s help, reaches the stoop and the inside of the door before he can’t focus on anything he’s seeing anymore.

“Buck,” he chokes out, before his feet buckle because he can’t breathe. The dark wood of the floor comes hard and fast.

“What the hell?” swears Bucky, who is on the floor in an instant, hands moving quickly but doing nothing because he doesn’t know what to do, not yet.

Buck’s breath comes hard, fast, but Steve’s doesn’t come at all. He tries to stand up, to scramble to his feet, but he keeps keeling forward, eyes blurry, lungs caught. Bucky takes one small wrist, then the other, and pulls him up. Steve’s knees only want to buckle, but he leans on Buck until there’s no weight left on his own feet.

“Come on,” Bucky says, arm around his shoulder, hip against Steve’s. Like a wounded three-legged race, they hobble towards the staircase. Every fiber of Steve’s body is focused, then, on the several feet between them and the stairs, and the three flights up to their place.

They make it to the first stair before Steve starts coughing.

He never decides which is worse: the sudden lack of air, or the ruthless cough that follows. But when he tries to climb those steps with Buck, the air pushing out of his lungs isn’t alone; it’s accompanied by its best friends: sticky phlegm and worse, bright red blood. 

“Jesus,” says Bucky, but there’s something strangled in his voice. Something in the trembling of his fingers, the quick beating of his heart, that Steve later identifies as fear.

The stairs aren’t anything at all now, it’s just Buck, just his hands on Steve as he picks up Steve’s skinny bones and carries him, carefully, to their apartment. Steve hones his attention on Bucky, just his heavy breaths and slow steps. It’s like Sarah Rogers’s pain exercise, except now he focuses all of his hurting into Bucky, as much as he can. Buck tells him to breathe, and even though Steve can’t, he does because Bucky tells him to.

It’s an impossible thing, to be so close to death and not be afraid, and Steve is. He feels it in his fingertips, down to the pulp of his heart, down to the marrow in his bones.

They make it to the apartment, somehow.

“Come on Rogers,” Bucky breathes, and lets him down on the bed. Suddenly Steve is sweaty, feverish, shaking. His cough continues, rapid and broken. He seesblood on their gray sheets. “Fight, Steve, you stubborn idiot. Don’t let this take you.” Steve keeps his eyes open, and listens, but every time he exhales the coughs come spilling after. Bucky grabs his hand and shakes it, as he can keep his heart beating and breath going by force.

Steve looks up, up into Buck’s big gray eyes and memorizes the exact shape of his face, of the cut of his jaw and the shadow under his eyelashes. Outside, thunder rumbles; it’s a winter storm.

“Buck,” Steve starts, gripping his friend’s hand with resolve and desperation, “Buck, I think I got to go,” he gasps out. His chest is convulsing, his breath bloody.

“No. No, shut up right now, Steve,” Bucky says. He’s holding Steve’s other hand now, holding him tight to this earth, to this bed. “Shut your dumb stupid mouth; you are not leaving me alone,” he says, and now he’s sitting on the bed next to Steve. Still squeezing his hands, Buck leans over Steve so their faces almost touch, so Steve can feel Bucky’s warm breath on his own face. Buck’s dark lock of hair, sweaty from all that work, touches Steve’s, sweaty with sickness. Steve feels his eyes drift shut: he’s so tired, in this moment, just like Sarah Rogers only four years ago, just like Joseph Rogers when that German soldier finally put a bullet between his ribs in France, because when he collapsed against the cold frozen ground after two years of fighting, all he felt down to the tissue of his stuttering heart, was relief.

“Stevie,” Buck says. Steve hears every piece of Buck- his heart, his soul, the dimple on his chin- poured into that word. “Please don’t leave,” he begs, just like Steve did when his mother stopped responding. Silence fills their apartment. Silence, except for the resounding roll of thunder outside the window.

And, miraculously, the hiccuping heartbeat in Steve’s chest.

 

Sarah Rogers would have called it a blessing from some Celtic faerie, but Steve just calls it luck. It was luck that kept him from falling off into the great unknown just like his mother did. It was fortune, and Bucky, who wouldn’t let him go, who pulled him back even when his eyes wouldn’t stay open and his throat was filled with blood. And God knows Steve would do the same for him: walk to the ends of the earth, bargain with the devil himself, just so Bucky could take one more breath, just so the muscle of his heart would contract and pump one more time, just so his lungs could inhale the stale Brooklyn air for one more moment. Steve knows this like he knows the Pledge of Allegiance and his service number: 98765320, take a breath, repeat: 98765320. Even now, so many years later, Steve remembers the cough in his throat, invading and pushing its way through his weak little lungs, and he remembers who stood there and fought it off when Steve couldn’t get up off the ground. His lungs remember.

 

1940: _I won’t pretend it didn’t make me afraid, because it did. It did. Seeing you fragile, all that fight gone, you wanting to give up, your face gone all pale; that scared me more than I can say. It made me angry too, made my eyes turn dark and made me want to run into the street outside and scream up at the sky. Why’d you do this to him, I would say. Why’d you do this to me? I don’t know if I was talking to God or not, but someone heard._

_I think, maybe, it was Sarah Rogers. God rest her soul, maybe she saw us, saw you, her baby alone in the world with nothing to hold onto but “that James Barnes,” like she used to call me. Maybe she wished you some good luck, huh? When the TB got in her lungs, I remember you told me she would be okay. She made it to America, you said. She made it to New York, to Brooklyn, to this place we got. She’ll make it past this because it’s what she always does. You were small for your age, and your blond hair was pale against your skin, that I remember. You were flipping a coin between your fingers, spinning the silvery metal between your knuckles. So sure, so confident that what was right would happen, that your Catholic God was on your side._

_It breaks my heart, really._

_I’ll tell you one thing: what’s right really does happen, sometimes. Maybe even most of the time, if you squint your eyes. But whoever dealt your cards in life, whatever divine being threw down your lot: they didn’t give you what you deserve. You deserve so much more than this, this tiny apartment in Brooklyn and stormy skies. A mother that’s alive and can still make her famous pies, a father who reads the paper and shakes his head at you while he’s smiling. A brother or two that’ll play baseball with you in the streets. Maybe I’d be in that life too, the boy next door, but I wouldn’t be all you’d have. Maybe- and this hurts, but it’s what you want, I know- maybe you’d have a girl. You’d take her out to the edge of the Atlantic, by the docks, and look up at all those twisting and intertwining stars, at that expanse of constellations you’ve tried to teach me. You’d pull her fingers into your own and press those lips onto hers._

_God, it hurts._

 

1941

Steve knows, maybe more than anyone, how much can change in a single moment. Worse, so much of Steve is made up of these moments, of the minuscule shifts that alter his world. The seconds in between his mother’s last breaths, with the fading Brooklyn light casting a halo around her blonde face, or the moment when Bucky turned over that newspaper, soaking wet in 1929: these few seconds shaped him, sculpted him out of clay into the person he is today, twenty-three years old and shaking.

Somehow, another one of these moments arrives in Steve’s life, on a cold December night in 1941. It’s an ordinary enough day: Buck reads the newspaper with a glass of water, then heads off to work. Steve goes with him to the city, today, because he’s got nothing better to do. Food comes easier, these days, now that the money and the stocks have returned, at least somewhat. Bucky can find something good to eat at most corner stores, and they can even afford the grocer sometimes. For breakfast, they have tiny peaches, not quite fresh but close enough, and a couple pieces of bread. At the docks, Buck hauls equipment and sweats, while Steve sits on the dock, sketching the scene. He imagines he can see all the way across the Atlantic, into Britain, where soldiers are shivering in barracks and airplanes. None of them American, he notes. They are, though, carrying weapons stamped with the USA’s signature, courtesy of Franklin Roosevelt. Because, as Bucky puts it: nothing’s more patriotic than showing those other countries that none of us have got the guts to fight in the war ourselves. Nothing’s more American than hiding behind the French and English soldiers carrying guns marked with our name.

Bucky finishes his work and Steve his sketch, a blazing scene of the docks with Buck’s muscled silhouette hauling boxes. The packages have the barrels of rifles poking out of them, and scrawled on their wooden sides is the truth: _for use in Hitler’s guts, sincerely, Franklin._

The whole of the country is waiting on edge for America to tip over into war. They know it will mean the draft, and rations, and danger, but still the people wait, eagerly, even, for Roosevelt to take the next step, to trade providing bullets with providing bodies. It’s a sick sense of waiting and anticipation, but Steve is waiting right along with them. Maybe, he thinks, when we actually join a war, they’ll accept me at the enlistment office because they need the numbers.

He waits, and he hopes.

It’s sick, he knows.

That night, sometime in the first week of December, Bucky and Steve return home exhausted. In the plot twist of the millennium, the heat has decided to work, so they sit inside with the window open, mixing the heated, smoky air with the frigid wind outside. Buck throws open his newspaper, the _Daily Eagle_ , even though he’s already read through it in the morning. Relaxed, Steve glances over Buck’s shoulder at the news. It’s the same old: war in Europe, stocks returning, FDR sending mixed signals, preparations for some exhibition.

Later, Steve wonders if he can count down to the second, if it’s even possible to measure how time narrowed down. Because now, there is only _before_ , leisurely and empty, and _after,_ tense and measured. They’ve moved the radio inside on account of the cold air outside, and Bucky decides to turn it on. Its dark shadow on the wall is hulking and silent, but a few half-hearted lines of news spew out. Leaning back, Buck returns to paging through the _Eagle._

“Hey, Steve, did you know that there’s some fancy fair coming here? It says in 1943, God, that’s two years away, except not really, ‘cause it’s almost New Years,”

“Yeah, I heard,” Steve says, distracted. There’s a light outside, jutting in through the window- a candle? Someone awake late at night?

“And it’s supposed to have all kinds of fancy machines, and that guy Howard Stark—“

“Buck,” Steve hisses. Silenced, Bucky drops the paper and looks over at him.

“Yes?”

“Look.” Outside, people are pouring in the streets, and he can hear the beginnings of someone shouting. A police officer is running out into the streets, but he’s lost in the crowd.

“Hell,” Bucky whispers. “Hey, turn that up,” he says, pointing at the radio. Slowly, Bucky turns the dial, until the words drown out the noise in the street. They can only listen, eyes wide, as the panic sets in, as the words on the radio scream out the reason for everything.

 _“Eight US navy battleships have been severely damaged in the Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii this morning. The bombing looks to have caused thousands deaths. We are awaiting further information—“  
_ “Boys!” The voice of the woman who lives above them cuts into their transfixed state. She’s standing at their door, clutching a candle in one hand and banging on the wood with the other. “Boys, turn on your radio!”

“We know!” Buck calls back to her, but Steve’s eyes are still stuck on the radio. Like a broadcast playing on repeat in his mind, he hears the words: _bombed Pearl Harbor. Bombed Hawaii. Bombed America. War._

This isn’t like before, when the radio told them Germany had begun its invasion of the European continent. This feels real and raw and bloody. Hawaii, Steve knows from school, is 2,390 miles off California. Far out of reach, impossibly far. But the thought of Japanese planes, of enemy planes, over that American land might as well mean they’re bombing Brooklyn.

“Bucky,” he says, turning to his friend. Because the world finally gave him what he begged for, delivered right on a silver platter: there’s no way Roosevelt can avoid the war any longer, not after this. But Steve doesn’t feel excitement, or fulfillment, or anything at all really, except fear. “They bombed Hawaii.”

Bucky meets his eyes, and Steve sees the mirror of his own emotions on Bucky’s face, scrawled in his big gray eyes and scrunched up eyebrows. “We’re safe.”

“They bombed Hawaii,” Steve repeats.

“And we’re safe, Steve—“

“Like hell we’re safe; this is a war.” Steve scrambles to his feet and to the radio and turns it down, then off.

Tomorrow, they’ll talk of enlistment, and Steve will become stubborn and sure and fearless. But tonight, December 7, 1941, the two of them sit huddled around the silent radio, as close as French soldiers tightly packed along the Maginot Line. The heat in their apartment keeps them warm, but Steve still stays close to Buck, like they’ve always done to keep out the cold, like God knows they will in Nazi France when they get there.

That night, Steve dreams of firebombs raining down over Manhattan until there’s nothing left of Brooklyn but the endless scent of hunger and blood.

 

1941: _Somehow, the situation has gone from awful to impossible. There’s no way I can keep you out of that war now, not with boxing lessons or logic or all the money in the world, not when American boys are going out there as soon as the army organizes itself. The posters are already going up: Uncle Sam commanding us to enlist away until there aren’t any boys left in America. I see the way you look at them, wide-eyed and dreamy. Pearl Harbor might’ve made you afraid, but these posters made you hungry._

_You’re so good, Steve. I know you believe in God, and I’m pretty sure he made you to be perfect and whole. Scrawny too, with a stubborn streak, but it works. It does. Everyone thinks you’re the golden boy. I think I might be the only one who knows you’re actually hell-raising._

_I’ve been alive for twenty-four years; I’ve known you for fourteen of them. But you’ve always been the most important person, the beginning and the end and the always. It’s a basic truth that even I can admit to myself, that you’re a compass pointed north. I can’t help but follow you._

_Does that mean I’ll have to go to war with you? I don’t know. I don’t want to pick up a gun and run straight into death, like I’m welcoming it with open arms. But for you, God only knows I would._

 

1942

“Right there.” Bucky points to a location on the dock, and Steve, grunting, lowers the box onto the worn wooden slats. Since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and dragged America into the war, the docks have been aching for more help. Their boys keep getting pulled away, shipped off to Basic. Steve knows that Bucky is watching as more and more leave, and he stays. More than a few of them have asked Bucky why he doesn’t enlist, and Buck always tells them he’s not interested. Of course, this must not be the truth, cannot be the truth, Steve thinks. Buck is staying for him, no matter what he says. That magnetic pull, the relentless drag towards Europe that Steve feels- he knows Bucky feels it too. He must.

“Any more?” Steve asks, feeling accomplished. Helping Buck out at the docks is no war, but until he gets his orders it’ll have to do.

“Steve,” Bucky says, a laugh hidden in his features. “Steve, you’ve hauled four boxes. There are thousands”

Frowning, Steve steps up to Buck until he is frighteningly aware of the foot of height difference. “And I’ve hauled four. You’re welcome.”

The laugh fights its way out of Bucky’s throat, and Steve can’t resist smiling. For a moment, all of the tension between them dissipates, and the only emotions hanging in the air are pure exhaustion, and happiness.

“Hey! Get to work, boys!” The old man running the docks glares over at them. He’s an old sailor type who has probably lived in Manhattan his whole life, and he’s aged with the city, filthy and whole. A pair of broken glasses slides down his nose, crooked like Steve’s own.

Bucky turns back to the boxes, inhales slowly, then starts hauling them. He gestures for Steve to do the same. Weary, suddenly, Steve takes a step forward and can’t catch solid footing on the ground.

The wooden pier rises up faster than he can call out or stop himself, and Steve’s head snaps back against the ground. _Not again._ Reluctant eyelids slide down over his blinking vision. He doesn’t even have time to wonder if the episode was triggered by his spine or his lungs before unconsciousness jerks him out of his body.

 

“Steve!”

It’s 1918, and his mother is naming him

It’s 1928, and he and Bucky have just met, with youthful red faces and innocence at their temples.

It’s 1929, and America is broken.

It’s 1936, and Sarah Rogers says his name for the last time.

It’s 1924, or 1937, or 1942, and Steve is sick.

“Steve!” Again. He is reaching up, pale arm extended, asking a girl to dance, hanging over the fire escape, holding a paintbrush in his thin fingers. He is reaching up for the voice, to snatch it in his hands and keep it steady. He is reaching up, up, up.

The darkness threatens to pull him down, but Steve sits up instead and hunches over on the ground, coughing out his guts.

“Jesus Christ, Steve.” It’s a familiar whisper.

“I’m—“ His attempt to talk skews off the path and dissolves into incoherent coughing. The room around him is dark, and it’s not the afternoon pier he passed out on. But it’s not their apartment, not the familiar four boxy walls, one with the stove, one with the bed, one with the table, and one with the window. No, he and Bucky are somewhere else- a warehouse, maybe?

“My boss said to take you in here and splash some seawater on your face. I opted out of that second suggestion, since your lungs might burn up in a fiery explosion if I did that.”

“Thanks?” Steve says, with effort. Lifting his left hand, he tries to rub the bleariness out of his eyes and wipe out the cobwebs crowding his mind. He can’t think, can barely see except the darkness and Buck’s ghostly outlined face. “What happened?”

“Kid, I think four boxes may have been too much, ‘cause you keeled right over on the dock. Scout’s honor, one second you were there and the next you were on the ground.” Bucky’s eyes aren’t angry, just sympathetic. Groaning, Steve falls back onto the dusty floor.

“I hate this,” he says. His eyelashes stick to his eyelids, and Steve realizes quiet tears are resting in his eyes. He won’t cry, not now, not in front of Bucky. Pinching his blue eyes closed, Steve wills the tears away, back where they came from.

“I know,” Bucky says, quietly. “Listen, Steve—“  
“Please don’t tell me about the war right now,” Steve interrupts, eyes still stuck shut. “I _know_ , Buck. I know.”

Even with his eyes closed, Steve can imagine Bucky in this moment, framed in the dim warehouse light, biting his lip and looking at Steve like he’s the biggest idiot in the world. In Steve’s vision, the shadows cut across Bucky’s face, leaving just his small mouth and gray eyes visible. He’s peaceful, even in a room surrounded by packaged weapons. Light is pooling at his eyelids and ankles.

“We got to go back, Steve,” Bucky tells him, after a few moments.

“Go on out; I’ll be there in a moment,” Steve answers, finally opening his eyes.

Nodding his assent, Buck starts to stand up from where he has been kneeling beside Steve. Then he hesitates, takes one extra breath, and turns back to him. “Listen, Steve. You can go home, if you want. MacArthur’ll be mad, but he’ll get over it. Just go out the back door,” Bucky says, pointing over to another exit hidden behind stacks of crates.

“No, Bucky. I’m not leaving you here; you might misfire one of those guns into your foot,” Steve shoots back, tired but still on his toes.

Buck lets a defeated laugh escape his mouth, and Steve sees in reality the expression he has just imagined. He’s still soft where the light and shadows reflect on his curved features, but his expression is less harsh than the Bucky that Steve envisioned. Somehow, his eyes are grayer, and the space he takes up is real, three-dimensional.

“Alright, but no more slacking, huh?” The words are thick with Brooklyn, tilted and sharp with the street he grew up on.

“‘Course, Buck. You’re the only slacker here.”

Bucky grips his shoulder, gives a small shake, and finally pushes himself off the ground. After he has jogged away, worn soles pattering against the ground until there isn’t a sound anymore, Steve sits back up, finally. Mid-afternoon light creeps in through high windows, but a coat of dust mutes the intensity.

He thinks of Bucky, outside with a jacket wrapped around him to keep back the cold. He thinks of all the weapons in boxes around him, ready to haul off to Basic and London and everywhere in the world where young, hungry American boys are ready to follow orders. He wonders, vaguely, how the country can suddenly afford to build all of these weapons, and where the metal came from. Where was that money when the stocks fell off their feet and half of America was bleeding out because they couldn’t afford bandages?

If Sarah Rogers was still alive, she’d have a job in one of those factories piecing together bombs and guns and salvaging bullets. She’d be making weapons that would end up in warehouses like these, useless until they were shipped away into the eager hands of soldiers.

Maybe that’s why it hurts, being here. Or maybe it’s because he’s supposed to be out there with those boys. One of these guns should be for him. The only things standing between him and a position as a soldier thousands of miles away are a bold, imposing _4_ and _F_.

The air inside the warehouse tastes like rusted metal. He knows, if he were to follow these guns across the Atlantic, if he were to watch them as they transferred hands from European dock workers to supervisors to soldiers, if he were to see where they went after that, they would taste, simply and truly, of blood.

He doesn’t want to admit it, ever. But he’d follow those guns, follow that gathering scent, just to get to the war. The dream is eating him alive now, forcing him to enlist one, two, three, as many times as he has to until he sees the right symbols on that form.

Bucky always asks him how he can be so sure of what is right. And the secret is, deep down, Steve is certain. But he can only be sure because of things like this, of the metallic taste of blood and the weapons and Uncle Sam’s accusatory finger. No matter what Bucky wants to believe, it’s not a moral compass guiding him, and that’s the worst part. He wants to do this for his mother and Bucky. Steve can never stand up and claim, honestly, that he wants to fight for America and only America, for her star-spangled flag and white-capped waves and purple mountains.

Steve closes his eyes again, as if he can hide in this dim warehouse forever. But outside, the world waits. Bucky waits. The boys in Europe wait, with fear in their eyes.

The ground is cold beneath his feet as they step across it, finally forcing him back into the bloody, honest light.

 

1942: _I’m not scared of the Nazis, or the Japanese. I’m not scared of bullets in my own heat or heart or neck, not right now. They can come for me, guns raging, and Steve, I would let them shoot me full of holes. Death doesn’t scare me._

_You scare me, though. More than bombs and planes and guns. Seeing you now, too stubborn to back down from enlisting, even if they keep rejecting you, fiery and so sure of yourself, I can easily take you now and imagine you in the war. You’re in a dirt-green uniform with a helmet and a gun, just like my brother. They’ll ship you off, but since you’re hellish at following orders, they put you in a unit that sits in the useless trenches all day and does nothing. Maybe you play cards down there, holding your loaded gun in your lap. Your blond hair is dark with French dust, and your skinny frame is all bent over. And then one day, after months of idling and whispering and watching across for movement, the Nazis come over and kill every single one of you with tanks and planes. Blitzkrieg._

_What the hell is wrong with me? I can see it so clearly, like a movie in my mind. And it scares me, you see, because I know you’d want it. You’d want to die for your country, knowing you were doing the right thing._

_You know what scares me, even more than the idea of your fighting in the war?_

_God, I can’t do this._

_Do you remember when we went dancing a couple weeks ago, with some of those girls from the church? Caroline, I think, was the one you were with most of the time. She pulled you around the dance floor, leading because you don’t know how. You probably remember I was dancing with another girl, red-haired Mary. She was stubborn, like you, and she was the type of girl who would eat me alive. But I managed to keep up with her for one night, spinning around the floor._

_But here’s the thing: the whole time I was with Mary, I couldn’t look her in the eyes. Maybe because I was terrified of her, but not really. Afterwards, when you were still dancing with Caroline, Mary pulled me outside and asked me, “How long?”_

_I swear, I’m not that obvious._

_But Mary just looked me over knowingly, leaned forward, planted a single kiss on my lips, turned, and walked away. She looked like she was carrying a storm with her, Steve; it was terrifying._

_The thing is, though, what she noticed, what she saw in my averted eyes- she’s not wrong. Actually, she’s so right that it hurts. Because while I was leading that beautiful girl around the dance floor, my arms around her waist and hers on my neck, while I was inches away from her, all I could think was—_

 

_I can’t do this, actually._

 

1942

Steve hears the pour of water as the sky darkens. He is alone by the window, but he has the top half of the glass pushed down. Brooklyn spills in, all of it, from the dirty smell of the streets to the cold night air. A lone light illuminates the road, and a slip of paper blows across the bright spot. Steve imagines it is a rejected enlistment form, crumpled up, wet with the tears of a boy who couldn’t fight for his country. He breathes in the dust.

Steps echo behind him, and he turns, slightly.

“Drink,” Buck whispers. In his hand he holds a silver cup, brimming with water. It’s an automatic response, or a precaution, ever since the summer of ’40. Water doesn’t cure him, but it helps. He takes the cup.

The two step together, two shadows cast by the light of the moon. Bucky leans against the sill and looks out. He sees the same scene Steve does.

“Whatcha looking at, Barnes?” Steve asks, playfully. Buck smiles, with half of his mouth.

“This beautiful view, of course.” He gestures to the brick walls across from the window, forming apartment buildings just like theirs, the dirt-crusted streets and the dim light. Above this, though, Steve sees stars and the moon in the black sky, beaming down on them. He turns to Buck, and the moonlight spills over his friend’s soft face and gray eyes. It really is a beautiful view, he thinks.

“Whadaya mean? Is Brooklyn not good enough for you?” Steve asks. Buck laughs, gives a half-hearted punch to Steve’s arm.

“No,” he says, but his voice stumbles. “Brooklyn’s perfect. It’s all perfect.”

“Don’t get sentimental on me now, Buck,” Steve warns. He grips the windowsill with his pale, thin fingers. “You forget we don’t have heat, or food, or anything. Hell, we’re lucky we got water,” he says, gesturing with the cup in his hand.

“Lose the cynicism, Rogers,” Bucky says, and a real smile plays over his face.“You’re the dreamer here. We can’t have your brain filling with sense now, can we.”

“Shut up,” Steve answers, grinning. The air is warm between them now.

“Listen,” Buck says, seriously. He reaches his left arm in the space between them and places it on Steve’s shoulder. His thumb traces down Steve’s sharp collarbone. “Listen, we got hell to pay for this war. You know what we’ve been doing out there? You know who’s died? Everyone. Americans, Nazis, Franks- bullets don’t care. You gotta promise me- Steve, you gotta promise me you’ll give up on this dream. You gotta.”

Steve pulls away from Bucky’s hand, because on this, he won’t compromise. He won’t sit down and cough and wheeze while the world is burning. While the boys next door keep leaving without saying goodbye, hair clipped short to head to Basic training in England. While the reels on before the pictures tell them to pitch into the war effort. While even the dames are in the factories, piecing scrap metal into bombs.

“I got to, Buck,” Steve responds. His back is straight now, his eyes sharp. “People are out there dying—

“Exactly,” Bucky interrupts. He breaks Steve’s gaze, turns to the window. “You’re not gonna go out there and die, you reckless punk.”

“Why’d you take me to those lessons at Goldie’s, then?” Steve counters. Buck grits his teeth, drops his head back like he does when he’s frustrated. Feeling righteous, correct, Steve keeps Bucky’s gaze. But he feels a burning in his throat, and maybe it’s the flecks of dust floating on the pale light from the street, but he can’t restrain a cough. His cheeks flush pink, and he doubles over. The familiar feeling of one winter ago returns: the lack of air, of warmth, of anything but Buck.

The silver cup clatters to the ground, and the water spreads out on the creaky floor.

Bucky, too wary of Steve’s condition to try and rub in this defeat immediately, takes his wrist and places one strong hand flat against his chest, even as it shakes and spasms beneath his touch.

“Now is not the time to fucking die, Rogers” he states, but his eyes are tender, worried. A lock of blond hair falls in front of Steve’s eyes, and his vision blurs.

“Not,” he sputters, trying to catch a breath, “until I’ve fought in that goddamn war.” Bucky laughs, vexed; Bucky laughs, hopeless.

And they stay there, one dark, steady shadow, and one small, shaking one, until the cough passes, until Steve can breathe again. Even then he doesn’t move away, and neither does Buck, a little afraid Steve will shatter.

Outside, the light on the street flickers out. Darkness reigns.

Bucky pulls away, suddenly but surely, and strides to the opposite side of the room. Matches are necessary; matches are all they have. He strikes one and the spark lights up the box walls of their one room apartment.

“Told you so, Rogers,” he states, continuing their conversations as if so many moments haven’t passed. The red of the match glows beneath his chin, shifting between the small dent in his chin. An imperfection. Funny, how Steve has so many, and Bucky has just one. Buck uses the match to light a small candle, which he places on the table.

“They need bodies,” Steve says, relentless.

“You’re not just a fucking body,” Buck answers. His eyebrows draw together, and this time it’s his cheeks that go red, but with anger. “Who’s gonna draw our Brooklyn sunset if you’re lying dead on some battlefield in France? Huh? Who’s gonna be the only one who can’t hold his stomach after riding the Cyclone?”

“Not my fault.” Steve pushes on Buck, who is so much bigger, stronger, steadier. He doesn’t break like Steve does, every time a gust blows in the open window. “Besides, doesn’t that just prove it? Doesn’t it all? I coughed my guts out, I rode the Cyclone, but I’m still alive. I’m still standing. I can do it all day. Stand up, I mean.”

“You’ve just got this chip on your shoulder- as if you need to prove you can fight, as if you need to ignore the fact that you’re sick. Steve, I got you those lessons because you kept getting beat up in alleys trying to stand up for everyone in the whole goddamn world.”

“I need to enlist,” Steve repeats: his mantra, his hope, his drumbeat. “You’re lucky- if you’d enlist, they’d take you immediately, no questions about your stupid breathing tubes.”

Bucky turns all the way from Steve, facing the wall and no longer the window. His fingers rub together by his sides: a nervous habit. If Steve were to draw him right now, the silhouette of his back, he would be one straight curve, about to sway off the page, tense with emotion.

“I don’t want no part in this war, Steve,” he says, quiet, serious. Steve can only breathe, with a slight wheeze, to fill the silence. Then Buck turns back around, and his gray eyes fall on Steve’s; he smiles again. “I’m gonna get some shut-eye, so you can return to you artistic brooding at the window.” Steve feels the twitch of a grin on his own face.

“Go ahead, get your beauty sleep. Sure wouldn’t want the dames thinking you were up all night.” Steve answers, playing along. Bucky’s eyes drop, but he’s still smiling. Bending over, he wishes out the candle, and they stand in darkness. The thump of Buck’s body falling against the bed startles Steve, but he rubs his eyes and steps away from the window, finally. Walking towards the bed, he shakes off his shoes and tugs off his socks. Buck, ever the laziest, hasn’t even bothered to remove his own. Gently, Steve slides off Bucky’s worn loafers. The tips are burnt red, like blood freshly exposed to oxygen, gulping it in. Buck’s toes twitch as he pulls of the second shoe, but he says nothing.

Steve brushes his hair out of his face and falls in bed next to Buck. Already, the sharp cold of Brooklyn’s winter is invading their space. Steve shivers, and Bucky slowly moves, placing his own arm atop Steve’s. His eyes are half-lidded; he’s mostly asleep. But under his arm, Steve feels warm.

“Night,” Bucky mumbles.

“Night, jerk,” Steve responds, fondly. Buck’s tired mouth twists into a half-smile, and sleep falls over them.

 

1943: _Damnit. Damnit all to hell, I’m going to die out there. I got the letter today, crumpled it up in my fist and hid it away before you could see it, but it’s too late. I saw it, saw the angry black letters: “…_ you are hereby notified that you have now been selected for training and service…” _What am I supposed to tell you? I can even imagine it, the shame in your eyes, not for yourself, but for me: that I had to be forced to get what you wanted so bad, down to your soul and insides. Maybe even anger, too: anger that it hadn’t been you, that I lacked so little decency that I didn’t want to go and fight and die for America._

_I’ll tell you a secret, since you’re never going to read this: I was lying before. I am scared. Not of Nazis, or bullets, or scrap metal bombs. I’m afraid of dying, sure. Everyone is, even if they won’t admit it, but no, that’s not what I’m mainly scared of. I’m afraid of myself, and what I’ll do out there. Now, mind you, I’m going to try and get out of it any way I can, charm the men at the enlistment office until their eyes bleed. But I think it’s cruel Fate pulling the strings, and that ancient goddess wants me on the battlefield, sure as she wants you in beat up Brooklyn. What I’m scared of is really what’s inside me, what I’m made of. Is it just blood and guts that’ll spill out on the dirt in France, same as everyone else? Or am I made of killing parts, the type of man who’ll shoot someone in the face and not think twice? I don’t know which is worse._

_If I end up out there, with the hailstorm of blood over my head and a stolen Nazi gun in between my hands, I want you to forget all about me. Get on a train and go out to Missouri or something. Because here’s the thing: I come home a killer or I don’t come home at all. You don’t want that. I don’t want that. I don’t want to see your cheeks pink and your eyebrows drawn together because you’re afraid of me. Don’t think I could stand it, you flinching when I go to give you a friendly shove. Or me flinching in the pictures because there’s guns up there. Sarah told me that, once, about your old man, how he couldn’t stand loud noises or bright lights. The war took something from him, she said. Funny, then, that he went back after that and the war took the rest of him._

_I gotta tell you, and soon, that I’ll be shipping off to Basic. I think I’ll have to lie. I’ve only ever lied to you once, you know, straight to your face. You asked me in ’38 if I had my eyes on a girl, and I told you yes, she’s blonde and pretty. Even then I wasn’t lying, exactly. You are pretty, when the morning sun breaks behind you, when the darkness splits up the blue in your eyes into all of the shades like a shattered jewel, and every time in between. So maybe I wasn’t even lying, then._

_But is it a lie if I’m hiding something from you, everyday, in every word I speak, in every cup of water and brush of skin and burnt out match? How can I lie if I never speak it?_

_I gotta lie to you now, though, and tell you I enlisted. I gotta._

 

1943

Winter in Brooklyn takes over the borough with little fanfare. Instead, the cold seeps in through cracks in the window pane and the gap between the door and floorboards. Winter storms riot quietly in the background, offering occasional snow thatlightly veils the apartments. Steve is used to the cold, because it’s been years since he’s had a real winter coat to bundle up in. Still, this year Bucky insists that Steve wear both of their dark brown jackets when November comes.

He refuses, at first, but his lungs hitch and protest in the cold enough to make him finally accept the offer. Two thin layers isn’t nearly enough, but it’ll have to do. It’s more than what most of the city has, anyway.

Novembers crawls by, the days spinning long and the darkness encompassing most of the minutes. Buck returns from the docks with dark circles under his eyes to match the sky outside, and his sleep dwindles down to a precious few hours. Steve’s drawings grow frenzied, as he tears off pages in his sketchbook and dumps them on the kitchen table, where Bucky always snatches them away to store somewhere.

It doesn’t escape Bucky that Steve sneaks out for the fourth time to enlist, and for the fourth time comes home empty-handed.

Finally, the month of November spirals down to the last few days. With one week left, Steve reads in the paper again about the World Exposition of Tomorrow, some huge technology fair in the city. He hasn’t been to Manhattan in a while, not since he last accompanied Bucky to the docks. The pictures of the setup in the _Eagle_ don’t betray much; they’re just grainy black and white representations of the supposed spectacles. Howard Stark’s smiling face beams out on every newspaper front page, next to bold headlines declaring him the “genius of our time,” a “modern Da Vinci.”

Steve has heard of Howard Stark, but then again, everyone has. Stark was the one who was building inventions during the Depression, safe in the comfort of his wealthy home and food available every day. And now, this expo is the project of that leisure. But Steve, like most of America, doesn’t really resent this privilege, not anymore. He merely wants to see its fruits; he wants to reap the benefits of Howard Stark’s mind and money. The paper tells him that it’ll open this Friday.

Meanwhile, Buck talks less and less of the war. Their radio still spews information: America is bombing Germany; American is fighting in the islands; the Brits trudge through Italy, but Bucky and Steve hardly ever discuss it. The week wastes away until it is Thursday night, and Bucky comes home with tired shock in his eyes.

“Long day?” Steve asks, leaning back in his chair at the kitchen table.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, Rogers,” Buck says back. His shoulders are slumped, fingers drumming up and down on his thigh as he grips the other chair and pulls it out to sit down.

“Was it MacArthur again? The man can be a real tool.”  
“No, I—“ Bucky grimaces, readjusting his thoughts. “I’m just tired.”

“One more day left in the week, Barnes,” Steve says, reaching over a hand to touch Buck’s exhausted one. Bucky jumps like Steve has shocked him with a bolt of lightning.

“Yeah, I… yeah. One more day,” Bucky mumbles. He puts all of his weight on the back of the chair and leans back, lifting up off the ground. Exhaustion has invaded the room, just like the insistent Brooklyn cold. Even Steve can feel his own lids drifting down, as if gravity has spontaneously decided it’s time to fall asleep.

“It’s not even late, Buck,” Steve says. Buck jerks back up, and the legs of the chair nearly slide out from under him.

“What?” He looks as if sleep has just shoved him back into the land of the living, unarmed and unprepared.

“Come on, Bucky. I know what you need,” Steve begins, standing up from the chair. He snaps his fingernails once, twice against the wooden table, then spins around and opens the third cabinet above the stove. It’s the only one without the handle hanging precariously from the wood, the only one they’ve taken care to maintain, and for good reason. Steve pulls open the cabinet and slips an arm inside, reaching around a box of matches to pull out a dirty, cracked brown bottle.

He shakes it and sure enough, a tiny amount of liquid is still left. The small glass container in his hand is everything and nothing like Sarah Roger’s buttermilk stash. It’s hidden away, kept for whatever special occasions they decide to celebrate, but it contains a substance that Catholic Sarah Rogers would surely not approve of.

“Alcohol?” Bucky asks, incredulous. “A depressant?”

“Come on, Buck. It’s been too long since we’ve properly celebrated.”

Bucky groans, still kicking his feet against the ground in his suspended chair. “What’ve got to celebrate?”

“I’m alive. You’re alive. It hasn’t snowed in a couple days,” Steve starts, hopping back over to the table. “Even better, this apartment has heat!”

“Now that, I can toast to,” Buck says. He finally kicks off his beaten shoes and sweaty work socks. “But also, cigarette?” he asks, smiling like a child eager to get what he wants.

“Aw hell, Bucky, you no I can’t say no to you, not when you pull that face,” Steve complains. With one arm, he reaches over to the windowsill where Buck’s smokes are waiting, and with the other, he slams the liquor bottle on the table, mustering as much force as the old glass can take.

“Thanks Steve, sweetheart,” Buck says, jokingly. Steve shoots him a fake smile and opens the cigarette pack himself. Dangling one of the rolls from his mouth, he keeps grinning at Buck, who has arranged his features in a disappointed pout.

“Oh, did you want one? I thought you were asking me to get one for myself,” Steve says, twisting the white paper around in his mouth. He won’t light it; Bucky won’t let him, because the smoke always makes his lungs go crazy with coughing. But he likes having it there, in his mouth. It reminds him of Bucky’s silhouette framing the window sill with the cigarette falling from his lips. He wonders if he resembles Bucky now, in just the curving silhouette and casual smoke.

“Very funny, kid,” Bucky says, and glances down pointedly at the box. “Cigarette, or I might have to down the rest of this alcohol myself, huh?”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“Oh, I would,” Bucky fires back, closing one hand around the fragile neck of the bottle.

“Fine, but you got to sit up here with me,” Steve declares. He spins on his right heel and collapses onto the bed, with his back wedged against the wall.

Buck narrows his eyes but quickly joins him, still gripping the bottle in one hand. Their shoulders bump as they reluctantly trade items: Steve gives up the pack of cigarettes, and Bucky hands over the liquor.

“What are we celebrating?” Steve asks, bringing the mouth of the bottle to his lips.

“Like you said- the heat, the weather, everything,” Bucky says. He puts a cigarette between his lips but then realizes the matches are all the way across the room, and drops it on the sheets between them.

“My Ma,” Steve adds, and drinks the first swig. The bottle has more in it than he thought: enough for each of them to have a few drinks. Months old and probably dangerous to drink, the alcohol buzzes in his system. He gulps it down until the warmth spreads throughout his body, from his crippled lungs to his crooked spine to his fingers and blistered toes.

“She would’ve hated this,” Bucky echoes, and takes the bottle from Steve. “To Sarah, amen.” He drinks too, and Steve sees him snap his eyes shut for a moment.

They drain the bottle after a few minutes, taking turns drinking a bit. The fizzy liquor burns through Steve, making him feel warm and relaxed and somehow aware, all at once. Bucky’s gray eyes have glazed over, and a nonchalant smile curves across his face. Once the bottle is empty, Buck tosses it aside and leans all the way into Steve, so their heads knock against each other.

“God, it’s so hot,” Steve says, even though he is shivering. Someone- Steve can’t remember who- left the window open, so the cold can sneak in and wrap around them. But all Steve feels is warmth and heat- from the alcohol inside him, blazing through, and Bucky’s feverish skin against his own where their sides touch.

“You know, Steve,” Bucky says, looking him in the eyes. “Ms. Moss over at Auburnale would have a fit if she saw you like this.” He laughs, but his eyes are focused over Steve’s head, on some point in the wall. “And your Ma, too. You’re supposed to be the golden boy.”

“I am,” Steve assures Bucky. Rolling his eyes, Buck leans in so their foreheads rest against each other and their legs overlap.

“You’re a troublemaking Brooklyn kid.”

“And you’re my straight-laced sidekick.”

Bucky tilts his head back, and his neck jumps as he breathes out a laugh. “Damn right.” The pack of cigarettes scratches the sheets, and Steve nods towards it, a question. In response, Bucky closes his eyes and parts his lips, just a little.

Steve slides out just one cigarette. The pack is just plain white, part of Lucky Strike’s campaign for the war. He spins it between his fingers and then reaches up and places it in Bucky’s mouth, right between his teeth, white like the box.

“You know, Becca says Trevor’s so bored out there in France that smoking is the only thing he’s got for his free time,” Bucky says, opening his eyes. “Matches?” he asks, squinting his eyes. Steve wonders if he’s forgotten just a few moments ago when he couldn’t find them himself.

“I’m not you’re girl, Buck. You can let her bring you the matches.”  
“No?” Disappointed, Buck leans his head on the wall behind the bed, still playing with the cigarette between his lips.

“Who’s your girl, Bucky?” Steve can start to here the slur in his own voice, interfering with the Brooklyn lilt. “Mary? Rose?”

“I ain’t got one, and you know it,” Bucky says. The cigarette scratches between his teeth, and Buck’s eyes are half-closed. “And you, Steven Grant Rogers? Who’s carrying a torch for you? If you’re gonna fight in this war, you’ll need someone to come home to.”  
“I’ll come home—“ Steve cuts himself off before he can stretch out that thought. _I’ll come home to you_ , he finishes. “I don’t have a girl, Buck.”

“You don’t?” Bucky asks this like he’s surprised, like the only girls that Steve’s ever talked to weren’t a foot taller than him, at least. “Huh. That’s strange.”

“No stranger than you, Barnes,” Steve fires back. He reaches out and taps with his index finger, just once, the cigarette in Buck’s mouth. They stay there, cast in the light of the lamp and shivering in the Brooklyn cold but warm next to each other, shadows intertwined and sides touching, until the dark in the sky fades to morning, and the world pulls them apart.

 

1943

Howard Stark’s twisted daydreams are nothing if not fantastic.

Steve has to keep himself from blinking too much in the face of all those bright lights and soaring steel structures. It really is a miracle, that so much science and so much dreaming, entwined together, could exist just miles away from Brooklyn’s poorest slums. And it’s even more of a miracle that Steve and Bucky are here. Bucky’s planned a double date with two girls, and now the whole of the future is laid out in front of them in glass cases.

“Hey Buck, do you think the whole world will look like this one hundred years fromnow?”

Bucky spins on the heel of his newly polished shoe. “Maybe in one hundred years we’ll all be flying around in robot suits or something. Maybe we’ll take balloon rides instead of car rides everywhere.” Steve grins.

“Hey Sergeant, what do you think of that?” One of the girls is gesturing towards a sealed glass case containing a scarlet red shell of a man. Steve can’t remember if her name is Connie or Bonnie- Bonnie was the blonde one, wasn’t she? Or was that Connie?

“Well, Bonnie, this right here says it’s a ‘Synthetic Man.’” Bucky says, pointing down at a panel explaining the exhibit. “Made of carbon and plastic polymer Horton cells.”

The creation stares down at them, ominous and tall. His skin is too shiny to be human skin, too plastic, and his red suit looks like something an out of date superhero from the movies would wear. All the same, he looks trapped, like Howard Stark has removed all of his oxygen and splayed him out for the people of New York to observe.

“Phineas Horton’s a genius, almost as smart as Howard Stark,” Connie points out, tucking a strand of brunette hair back into her curled bob.

“He hasn’t got the personality, though,” Bonnie says. “He’s probably an old man. Howard Stark is… attractive.”

Bucky glances, wide-eyed, back at Steve, and Steve is struck again by the uniform he’s wearing and how well it suits him. Two years ago, he never would’ve thought that Bucky would fit so well into the role of soldier, of leader, of sergeant, specifically. His reaction to Steve’s decision to enlist proved that, if anything. But a couple months ago, Bucky announced that he had enlisted in Manhattan and would be heading off to Wisconsin for three weeks. Now, his army uniform is dark against the Exposition’s lights, and he’s headed off to Basic in England tomorrow. The cap on his head is tilted slightly skyward, but his mouth is still quirked in a familiar, smoky smile. He looks _good,_ like a soldier from one of those recruitment films; Steve can see why Connie and Bonnie want to be here with him.

“Don’t worry, Buck,” Steve mouths back from behind. “Howard Stark is much, much more attractive than you.”

If Bucky still had that newspaper from earlier, Steve knows Bucky wouldn’t hesitate to hit him on the head with it.

“I think the main display is starting!” Connie grabs Bonnie’s hand and the two run off to the grand stage. Sure enough, showgirls are sweeping back the velvety curtains to finally reveal the exhibition behind them.

Bucky falls back for a moment, so he’s walking with Steve: the same stride, but Bucky is just a foot or so taller.

“Do you think the blonde one’s cute?”

“Bonnie? She’s alright, I guess. But more importantly, is Connie your girl?”

Buck’s eyes flicker down to the floor, then back up to meet Steve’s again. He has a piece of dark hair falling into his eyes, underneath the brim of his cap. “Maybe. I don’t know. She wants to get married when I get back from Europe.”

“Well damn, Bucky! You could get yourself a wife!”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “But the thing is, I don’t even know when I’m going to get back. Connie’ll probably find some other guy before I do.”  
“Aw, Buck, cut yourself some slack. She seems nice enough to not ditch you.” Steve reaches a hand up to squeeze Buck’s shoulder, even though he has to stand on his toes to do it.

“Yeah. Steve, listen—“  
“Sarge! Come on!” Connie yells over the whirring sounds around them. Bucky stops talking, shrugs, and strides forwards to the girls.

They were right: Howard Stark is attractive. And worse, he looks about the same age as Bucky. But his flying car sputters out and collapses onto the stage, with all the resolve of a guy who’d just lost a fight. That spark in his eye- his charisma, the girls would call it- shifts to a look of restrained anger as he kisses one of the showgirls on the stage again and then ducks off into the wings.

Stark and his beautiful, monstrous creations would be one of those American things that Sarah Rogers would dismiss, just like Coney Island or cream cheese. Too fantastical, she would say, to really be true. And when the flying car sparks and falls back to the ground, Steve feels her doubt inside of him, itching inside his lungs where she planted it.

Later, when Erskine enlists him in the SSR and Connie disappears forever and Howard Stark starts working on a brand new, sparkling project, Steve learns that doubt, like good, clean food during the Depression, is a luxury he cannot afford. When Bucky ships off to England, completely off the map except for a few scattered letters, when Steve runs off to Jersey and Brooklyn becomes like a hazy memory in the back of his head, he has to trust in the fantastic, because it’s all that is left in the world, because Howard Stark built an empire out of a dream, because somehow, in some convoluted confusion of history, Steve becomes, just like the flying car, a tangled piece of Stark’s eternal, consuming vision.

 

1943: _For the first time since 1936, I’m not sharing a room with you. They’ve got us in barracks here at Basic, with men stacked up like sardines in these tiny places. England, from what I can tell, is cold and dreary, especially in the wintertime. There’s so many people here, Steve, filling up the 107th. You don’t need to come. Half of America is already here, at Basic._

_The day we came here, fresh off the bus that had taken us from the plane across the ocean, the sun was splitting the sky above the camp. The buildings were all “bathed in golden,” like a real writer would say, and when we stepped off the bus everyone just had to stop and look around. Even I did, and I never wanted to be there. Buildings everywhere, Steve, and fields and trees and so much sky. I could never count all the stars. And the men: filling up every corner and crevice and field. Like I said, I think America’s sent all it has to give. Who’ll stay at home and buy stocks and run the banks and heat in the apartments? Like I expected, the officers are all tall and intimidating and know how to serve up a mean punishment. First day, this green-eyed kid next to me kept on talking about guns and how he already knew how to fire one, growing up in Virginia and all that. But they stuck all of us fresh blood in hauling equipment- no, not even equipment: dirty blankets and ragged coats. Even though most of us already had trained in Wisconsin. Poor kid looked like he’d had all the excitement knocked out of him. Worse, before they put us to the cheap work they lined us all up and took our clothes like we were prisoners in some crazy ward. Gave us all standard-issue gear that makes me feel like I’m not even a person anymore. I’m just a floating head, or just a number. Yeah, they gave us those too. I keep counting mine in my head: 32557038. The more I say it, the more I hate it. But it’s like a mantra; it’s like you, Steve. I can hold on to it more solidly than the wooden sides of my bunk or the puke buckets when one of the younger ones starts retching at night._

_Trevor sent a letter to me, once, back in ’42. He said everyone in the war gets nightmares, whether they talk about it or not. I think that means he has them too, but he didn’t say it- go figure. Here, though, it’s not the hell that’s out on the fields and it’s not the ordinary life at home. It’s like floating in between, sort of. The boys are mostly smiling, kind of like the poster boys you see on those enlistment banners. But we know the reality, or at least some of it, means getting your identity stripped down to a grunted surname and an eight digit number._

_We’ve moved on, now, from hauling laundry and cleaning latrines to holding guns and aiming them and shooting them. I’ve got myself an M1 Garand rifle. It’s not all mine- I gotta share it with a redhead from Jersey (Jersey!) and some kid all the way from California with a French accent. But I’ve shot it more times than I can tally up for you, right at the target. At first, my stupid fingers were useless around the barrel, slipping and sweaty. But after a frighteningly low number of attempts, I can successfully murder the target as many times as the supervisor yells at me to._

_I’m telling you this now, about the guns and the nightmares and the dreamy life here, because I can’t tell you this in my real letter. They read them, you know, and I don’t want some superior assigning me to latrines for the next month ‘cause I needed to complain to you. In fact, I don’t even know what to write in my real letter. I can’t sum it all up with just a few well-placed words and a pen. You see, I know you’re back there in Brooklyn wishing you were on the bunk above mine, running laps with us and doing push-ups until your lungs sing with pain. I even think you’d like having a number to identify yourself with, for some strange reason. But how can I write in my letter, thank God you’re not with me? I can’t, you see. So I gotta write it down here, and if I get around to writing you back in the states, I’ll tell you how I wish you were here so you could get in fights with the guys from Jersey. And I’ll ask you to send me smokes, since the ones they issued us are cheap and taste like they were made from mud, not nicotine._

_Charlie in the bunk next to mine asked me who I’m writing to every night. My girl, I told him. I scratched out your name and wrote Rose on the first page of these letters, in case anyone decides to be nosy and read them. I’ll go back and change it later, when we’re both safe at home in Brooklyn._

 

1943

Snow visits Brooklyn on Steve’s last night in New York. Later, when the dust and blood has settled, he’ll realize that this was the last ordinary night of his life, the last hours before he changed in a thousand different ways. In fact, he’ll think even further back to his last night with Bucky before he shipped out, drunk and laughing in their apartment. But now, Steve sits alone at a bar, unaware that this is another one of those moments, like Pearl Harbor, when the earth spins on its axis and deals him a new set of cards.

“You of age, kid?” the barkeep asks, scrubbing a single glass with determined repetition. His eyes have heavy bags under them and bloodshot surfaces. Steve can imagine that business hasn’t been good at the bars, not after the majority of their customers waltzed off to England. The only other soul in the room is an old man sitting in the corner playing checkers against himself.

“No,” Steve deadpans. The man considers him, wipes one greasy hand on his shirtfront, and shrugs.

“What’ll you have?”

“Something strong.”

The bartender quirks a ruffled eyebrow at him. “You want me serving you illegally and you’re gonna have to be more ‘pecific than that.”

Steve tries to remember how much duress the man must be under before he replies. “Specifically, the strongest drink you’ve got.”

It’s been three days since Bucky told him he had enlisted, and two days since he disappeared off to Basic. Doctor Erskine told him they were leaving for Camp Lehigh at eight o’clock sharp on Monday morning. What kind of Basic happens in Jersey instead of Europe, Steve doesn’t know, but it’s more than nothing and that’s enough for him right now.

Outside, lights reflect off sheets of glimmering snow in the streets, while flakes continue raining down. If Bucky’d been here, he would have complained about the gentle flurries. His favorite had always been the wild winter storms that blew ladies’ umbrellas in the street and forced the two of them to stay in, shivering together in the flat above them because the woman who lived there would share her fireplace.

“Drink?” Plunking the glass against the wooden counter, the barkeep gives him a half smile. The drink is down Steve’s throat before he can reconsider or respond, warming his insides like that old fireplace never could. He tastes warmth and excitement for sunrise tomorrow, but he also senses in his stomach the consuming loneliness of having no one to share the excitement with, not anymore. “So, you’re not of age to enlist?” the man asks him. He picks up a second glass between his thumb and fingers and begins ruthlessly attacking it with a rag.

“Nah, I am,” Steve says. He chokes as his lungs fume about the alcohol, but he swallows it down. “I’m twenty-five. I was only joking before.”  
“Twenty-five? Kid, you look a spry sixteen, at most.”

The boys back in grade school used to call him ‘Stickman,’ because of his skinny legs and knobby elbows. At George Washington, Steve nearly got counted out of graduation and shuffled in with the freshman. The teachers at Auburndale wouldn’t let him participate in physical recreation because they thought his bones might snap. And no one, not one single company in all of Brooklyn or Manhattan, wanted to hire a twenty-five year old whose spine looked like it might curl up and dissolve any minute.

“Yeah, I got that,” Steve mutters.

“Seriously. You need some meat on those bones!”

“I’m going to the war,” he cuts in, swirling the ice cubes around in his glass. Surprised, the man tilts his head back to consider this.

“Army?”

“Yes, sir.”  
“You get drafted?”  
“Nope, enlisted right here in Brooklyn, and I’m shipping out tomorrow.”

The man in the corner vigorously flips all his checkers, kinging every last one of them. Snow taps on the window, knocking to get in.

“And where are you headed? London?”

“Uh— yeah. 107th,” Steve lies. The SSR may be his own blessing from God, but Erskine made it sound serious enough that it’s worth keeping a secret.

“You ever shoot a gun?” An image flashes in his head, then, of Bucky with an army uniform on and a gun on his hip.

“Not yet, sir.”

“Ever seen one?” The bartender has dropped the glass now and is hanging over Steve with his both arms pressed against the counter and elbows locked.

“Yes, sir. My father fought in the war,” Steve answers, proud. Sarah had a grainy army picture of Joseph Rogers in his uniform, eyes focused somewhere under the camera, along with a photograph of his father next to one of his comrades, loosely gripping a gun.

“You know,” the man says, turning his eyes out the window. “We’ve got more than one war now. Pretty soon we’re gonna have to stop calling it ‘the war.’ Personally, I think a better name would be: the Germans fuck things up, part one. And the hell you’re headed to is: the Germans fuck things up, part two.” He sounds pleased with himself, like he spent hours coming up with that. A memory knocks on Steve’s mind, of just two days ago: Doctor Erskine with his heavy German accent and his test; Steve’s own words: _I don’t like bullies. I don’t care where they’re from._

“You know it’s not all Germany’s fault,” Steve says. “It’s the Nazis.”

Shaking his head and stepping away from Steve, the man retreats to the wall. “Kid, when you’re shooting someone up there in France, and you stop to ask him whether or not he’s a Nazi, you let me know how that goes. It’s all the same to me when they’re wearing the German colors.”

Steve blinks his eyelashes down and twists his hand around the glass. “The same colors.”

“What?” Rubbing one hand against the glass, the bartender frowns over at him.

“If you hurt everyone, not just the ones causing the problems, then we’ll all wear the same colors.” In his mind, Bucky is sitting next to him with eyebrows pinched up, saying: you don’t want to do this. You don’t want to get beaten up by a forty year-old man in a bar. It’s a familiar, helpless monotone.

“And what are those?” the man asks, creeping his fingers over the rim and leaving them there.

“Red.”: like the sheets after Steve coughed up his guts onto them, like the boys on the USS Arizona, like the sky over Brooklyn when Steve closed his eyes back in ’41.

The man seems to be too self-respecting to beat up a twenty-five year-old kid in his place of business, but his eyes cut into Steve and say: it’s time to leave. Gladly, Steve gathers his thin brown coat, drops a dime on the wood, and walks to the door. The checker-playing man taps his reds against the board, mumbling a quiet drinking song.

_I change, you change, we change, the times change._

_How did we ever know?_

_How did we ever know?_

_Back when we started, that the times would change._

A ghost of five years ago fills Steve’s mind: He and Bucky are walking out of another place with a man staring angrily after them. A lonely shadow trails behind Steve now, without Buck’s to accompany it. In 1938, the war hadn’t begun. Christ, in 1938, he still went to Auburndale and got shoved around by those kids.

“Hey, soldier!” A rusty voice spins him back around, and the bartender gazes over at him.

“Yeah?”

“A dreamer like you shouldn’t be fighting this war,” he says, carefully. Steve has half of his body in the doorway, one foot out in the snowy streets.

“If I don’t fight it, then who will?”

The man tilts his chin up, and Steve sees the age under his eyes, the fear in his irises. “If you don’t dream, then who will?”

Steve’s second foot joins his first on the street before the bartender can take another breath.

Brooklyn’s cold bites him until he reaches the apartment, shaking and freezing and all at once alone. He makes a space on the bed and falls down, exhausted. One pale hand loosens his tie and the other pulls his jacket tighter around his arms, vainly reaching for warmth. A light on the stove blinks over at him; Steve hasn’t had any real food since Bucky left.

Tomorrow will arrive, he knows. Tomorrow, he puts on a uniform and becomes a soldier, just like Bucky, just like his father.

Tonight, Steve can be a dreamer.

His sketchbook rests light on his lap under the harsh moonlight. Brooklyn is every color, from the purples of wildflowers in street cracks to the fluorescent oranges on street corners that are two expensive to purchase, but today he has to paint it in just four. He draws what he knows; he draws what he must. Today, Bucky wears a soldier’s uniform just as Steve imagined, but in his hand he holds a war letter addressed to Steve. The truth, Steve has found, always and never finds its way to the waxy, messy surfaces of his drawings.

 

Evening fades to black as the sun disappears beyond the horizon, and night begins its tirade through Brooklyn. In a bar closer to the city, Abraham Erskine tries to drink away his country and his home. Dozens of New York boys clutch their enlistment forms with 1A stamped into them, while their mothers and sisters return from work at the factories with soot-stained hands and aching backs. The city’s skyline bends and breaks into indiscernible darkness. A sixteen-year kid old shrugs the blood off his stubborn face in the back of an alley. Behind velvety curtains, Howard Stark’s creations whistle and cry out. And in every borough, in every nook and tavern and fire escape, Americans hunch over their radios and _hope_ , with war bonds and rations and victory gardens, with scrap metal bombs and melted down jewelry, with boxes hauled and soldiers sent and taxes paid. They pray to God the war doesn’t come here, not to their Manhattan or Staten Island or Brooklyn. And as night melts around New York, a stark white sun peeks over the horizon in Nazi-occupied France. Austria wakes to the sounds of bullets, but it’s only training. England slumbers on, all those soldiers packed in her guts, ready to explode like a canister of amatol. A Soviet army spills over into Germany, close enough but not quite touching her borders tainted with those huge red flags. Across the Pacific, at Tarawa Atoll, the battleground smokes. The soldiers sleep.

Bucky Barnes keeps one hand on his dog tags and the other on his notebook under his thin bunk pillow. Across the Atlantic, Steve Rogers looks up at the stars from the Brooklyn fire escape, just like Bucky wanted him to. Around them, the war rages, and begins.

 

 


End file.
